Hospitals have been accused of age discrimination after a study found that they failed to provide basic standards of care to many patients aged 50 and over.

Health experts found shortfalls in the quality of care offered to patients with conditions such as osteoarthritis, incontinence and osteoporosis.

They also found that doctors paid particular attention to assessments that earned them extra money, including heart disease, diabetes and high blood pressure.

Nick Steel, senior lecturer in primary care at the University of East Anglia, who led the study, said: “One of the conditions that came out worst was osteoarthritis, where we asked people if they’d received basic advice such as doing exercises to control the condition, and whether they had effective pain relief.

“At the more severe end of the scale, for those with severe osteoarthritis, we asked if they had been given the opportunity to see a specialist to talk about joint replacement. There were also issues around whether elderly patients had been asked the reason for their falls. These types of areas did not fare so well in the study.”

The research, published in the British Medical Journal, found that the quality of healthcare for people with common health conditions “varied substantially by condition”.

The researchers quantified what treatments for 13 different conditions – including heart disease, diabetes, stroke, depression and osteoarthritis - could be expected.

In total, these numbered more than 19,000 different opportunities for care to be delivered to people, but actual care was given only in 11,900 (62 per cent) of those cases. Scores on the quality of care ranged from 83 per cent for heart disease to 29 per cent for osteoarthritis.

The researchers found that substantially more care was provided for general medical conditions (74 per cent) than for geriatric conditions (57 per cent), including falls, osteoarthritis, urinary incontinence, cataract problems, hearing problems and osteoporosis.

Campaigners said that patients with arthritis were often being “fobbed off” by GPs and accused the NHS being guilty of a degree of ageism.

Gordon Lishman, director-general of Age Concern, said: “These figures show that age discrimination within the NHS is still rife.

“The rewards system for GPs to treat particular conditions has worked – but this hasn’t included health problems older people particularly suffer from like depression, falls and vision and hearing problems. The system is therefore clearly failing thousands of older people.”

The study involved a series of questionnaires and face-to-face interviews with 8,688 people.

Kate Jopling, head of public affairs at Help the Aged, called the results depressing. “This is extremely shortsighted in an increasingly ageing society,” she said. “This kind of ageist treatment is precisely why legislation against age discrimination is needed.”

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