Satisfaction with NHS collapses despite Labour vow to fix service

Yahoo

02-04-2025

Public satisfaction with the NHS has collapsed to a record low despite Labour vowing to turn the health service around.
Experts said the NHS had not received a post-general election 'bounce' in public perception, which was likely because the Government had declared it 'broken'.
The annual British Social Attitudes survey, which is considered the gold-standard measure of public sentiment, found a record low of just 21 per cent of Britons were satisfied with the NHS.
This is the lowest since the first survey in 1983 and down from 24 per cent the year before. It has plummeted 39 percentage points since 2019.
At the same time, a record high proportion of the public (59 per cent) were dissatisfied with the health service, up from 52 per cent the year before.
Almost 3,000 people were surveyed in September and October for the report, which is produced by the Nuffield Trust and The King's Fund think tanks, and took place just months after Labour took power.
Mark Dayan, co-author and Nuffield Trust policy analyst, said since the pandemic, there had been 'a startling collapse in NHS satisfaction'.
'This was no aberration: it is continuing even today. It is by far the most dramatic loss of confidence in how the NHS runs that we have seen in 40 years of this survey,' he said.
The report suggests the public agrees with Sir Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting's rhetoric about the NHS being 'broken' and that this 'may partially explain the lack of a post-election 'bounce' in optimism from Labour supporters seen the last time their party swept to power'.
It said satisfaction rates the last time Labour held office were an 'astonishingly high 70 per cent' and felt 'almost unreachable' today.
Mr Streeting, the Health Secretary, said the Government had 'taken the NHS off life support' since the survey was carried out.
'Thanks to the necessary decisions we took in the Budget, we've invested a record £26 billion over two years, ended the crippling strikes, cut waiting lists for five months in a row and delivered two million extra appointments seven months early,' he said.
'There's a long way to go, but we are fixing our NHS to make it fit for the future.'
The growing discontent with the NHS was seen across supporters of all political parties, and satisfaction fell among both Conservative and Labour supporters despite the change of Government.
For the first time, the report included the sentiment of Reform Party supporters, who were the least satisfied with the NHS at just 13 per cent.
The analysis also found that 70 per cent of people in Labour-run Wales were dissatisfied with the NHS, which was worse than England and Scotland.
The authors of the report said the findings made for 'grim' reading across the board.
There were falls in satisfaction across services, including dentistry and general practice, which saw satisfaction levels decrease to record lows of 20 per cent and 31 per cent respectively.
But the biggest drop-off was in Accident and Emergency, with just 19 per cent of the public satisfied with the service.
It means A&E is the worst performing NHS service in the public's eye for the first time.
Satisfaction with social care also remained at historic lows of just 13 per cent.
The service people were most happy with was inpatient and outpatient hospital appointments, despite bringing down the 7.4 million backlog a priority for the Government.
The researchers said the findings posed a conundrum about which of the areas to target for improvement.
There was also widespread unhappiness with NHS waiting times and difficulty accessing services, including the time it takes to get a GP appointment, be seen in A&E or get a hospital appointment after a referral.
However, just over half of the public were satisfied with the quality of NHS care they received once they had been seen.
Most people believed the NHS should get more or the same amount of funding it currently does and that it needed more staff.
Bea Taylor, lead author and fellow at the Nuffield Trust, said the findings show 'just how dismayed' people are about the state of the NHS.
'The Government says the NHS is broken, and the public agrees,' she said.
'But support for the core principles of the NHS – free at the point of use, available to all and funded by taxation – endures despite the collapse in satisfaction.'
Some 68 per cent of over-65s are satisfied with the quality of care compared with 47 per cent of those who are younger.
Meanwhile, 90 per cent of adults continue to support the founding principle of the NHS that it is free at the point of use, and 80 per cent still want it funded from general taxation.
However, the proportion 'definitely' agreeing that it should be available to everyone fell 'significantly' from 67 per cent to 56 per cent.
Dan Wellings, senior fellow at The King's Fund, said: 'The latest results lay bare the extent of the problems faced by the NHS and the size of the challenge for the Government.
'While the results are sobering, they should not be surprising. For too many people, the NHS has become difficult to access: how can you be satisfied with a service you can't get into?'
It comes as a separate study, published in the BMJ Quality and Safety journal, found almost one in 10 people believe they have been harmed by the health service in recent years.
Researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine said that when treatment causes physical or emotional harm, there can be long-term impacts, as they said that there is 'still some way to go to improve safety across the NHS'.
The survey of more than 10,000 adults across England, Wales and Scotland found that 9.7 per cent reported that they had been caused harm by the NHS in the last three years.
An NHS spokesman said: 'While it's reassuring that most people continue to back the founding principles of the NHS and remain satisfied with the quality of care – particularly older patients who use it most often – it's clear that many are understandably frustrated with waiting times and access to key services like GPs and A&E.'
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