Public satisfaction with the NHS has increased for the first time since 2019.
But although 26% of British adults questioned in the British Social Attitudes survey were satisfied with the health service – an increase of 6% from 2024 – the majority, some 51%, said they were dissatisfied with their experience. That “sounds more like a cause for concern than celebration”, said The Guardian in an editorial.
Puzzling findings
“The public appears inclined to accept the government’s narrative of a broken system being painstakingly put back together.” But hospital waiting lists are “still huge”, NHS dentistry has “probably never been in a weaker state” and there’s “justified impatience” on lagging social care provision. So “having pronounced the NHS ‘broken’”, Wes Streeting and his Department of Health and Social Care colleagues must “hurry up with their repairs”.
Article continues belowThe Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Still, the survey results, published by The King's Fund think tank, suggest the health service is “finally on the long road to recovery”, said The Mirror. The “gold standard assessment” found that the Labour government’s first full year in power “saw the greatest fall in dissatisfaction” in the NHS since “New Labour’s first full year in power in 1998”.
“Puzzlingly,” said Joseph Freer, from Queen Mary University of London, on The Conversation, “overall satisfaction rose”, but there was “no corresponding rise in satisfaction with each individual NHS service: GPs, A&E, dentistry and hospital care”.
This might be because services “did genuinely improve”, but the survey “simply did not poll enough people about each individual service to reliably detect small improvements”. Or perhaps the “political context” has “shifted”: a European study found that how people “feel about” the health system is now “influenced by things outside it”, such as “the political climate and what they see in the media”.
Skill shortage
While “debate” on the NHS “typically focuses on funding, waiting lists and plans for reform”, said Chris Day, chair of the Russell Group, in The Times, the system’s “most fundamental constraint” is that it “does not have enough skilled people”.
There are more than 100,000 vacancies across the wider “health ecosystem” and “demand for staff is rising faster than the system is able to meet”, thanks to “an ageing population, rising chronic illness and growing expectations”. So the “real solution” to improve the NHS experience is to increase “training capacity” and support a “range of alternative career paths into healthcare”.
Everyone should care, because the fate of the NHS is “a question that matters even to those who rarely use” it, said Chris Smyth in the Financial Times. Its budget of £200 billion “dwarfs any other public service” and will hugely “determine” whether Rachel Reeves imposes more tax rises.
The issue is also “central” to Labour’s “tenuous hopes of political recovery”; if Labour can’t convince voters it’s “fixing the NHS”, it “will have little else to offer”. But if it can “demonstrate tangible improvement” it will have a “powerful argument” against Nigel Farage, who has “repeatedly questioned whether the NHS funding model can survive”.