More people in England, Scotland and Wales are now more dissatisfied (41%) with the NHS than they are for the first time since 2002, according to a survey by the National Center for Social Research (NatCen). Dissatisfaction then led to Tony Blair’s Labor government to raise taxes to improve service and introduce targets to ensure prompt care. Satisfaction has fallen by 17% since 2020 – the biggest drop since records began in 1983. The collapse is due to frustration with long waiting times for all major NHS treatments, persistent staff shortages and widespread belief that the government has refused is the funding it needs. NatCen’s British Social Attitudes survey found the lowest levels of satisfaction with GPs (38%), dentists (33%), A&E (39%) and inpatient services (41%) and outpatients (49%) since he started watching the attitude of the public. The shift has occurred in individuals of all ages, income groups, genders and party political beliefs. The think tanks King’s Fund and Nuffield Trust, which published the findings, said they were unprecedented and represented “the most astonishing set of results we have ever seen”. The Covid pandemic and the ensuing disruption to NHS services have deepened the decline in satisfaction, but the misery – especially with access to doctor appointments and routine surgery – was evident long before that. The NHS has seen a decade of funding crunch and a failure to address chronic staff shortages, thinktanks added. “People often find it difficult to get the care they need and identify access to general medicine, hospital waiting times and staff shortages as areas that need to be improved,” said Dan Wellings, a senior fellow at King’s Fund. While the arrival of the pandemic in 2020 initially created a “halo effect” around the NHS, it gave way to more negative public behavior last year when people “saw other services open [and] thinking “well, why not open the NHS?” he added. About four out of 10 people in England are now either on the NHS’s 6.1 million waiting list for scheduled care or have a family member who is. “This is the story behind the frustration – people are getting worse and worse, people are visiting their doctor because they can not get to the hospital because of the waiting lists,” Wellings said. In the best news for the NHS, the representative survey of 3,112 Britons in September and October found strong ongoing support across all polling stations for its founding principles: that it is funded by general taxation and is available free of charge. The public also remains happy with the quality of care they receive and with the attitude and behavior of the staff they treat when they receive treatment. “People can be very supportive of the NHS and be unhappy at the same time,” said Professor John Appleby, director of research at the Nuffield Trust and chief economist. Wellings refused to draw parallels with the high public outcry now and the resentment that was a key issue in the 1997 general election and that contributed to the defeat of Conservative Prime Minister John Major. But resentment could merge into a political problem for Boris Johnson, he added. “It’s a very troubling set of findings for the government, given the NHS’s place in the minds of the British public and the fact that it is one of the key issues people are voting on in an election.” The Ministry of Health and Social Welfare did not immediately comment on the findings. A spokesman said: “The pandemic has put a lot of pressure on the NHS, so we are focusing on recovering from Covid’s impact and implementing reforms. We have drawn up our plan to tackle the Covid-19 backlog, with the support of our record multi-billion pound investment over the next three years. “We have seen record numbers of staff working for the NHS this year, with more than 4,300 doctors and 11,700 more nurses than last year, and we recently commissioned the NHS to develop a long-term workforce strategy.” Professor Martin Marshall, president of the Royal College of GPs, said he was “extremely disappointed and saddened” by the historically low level of GP service satisfaction. He emphasized the role of family doctors in the release of the Covid vaccine and pointed out the major problems facing the general practitioner’s workforce as the main reason why some patients find it difficult to make appointments.
