Growing numbers of Britons think the NHS is getting worse and fear for its future, a survey has found.
Ipsos Mori polling last month found that 57% of people believe that the NHS’s ability to deliver the care and services it provides worsened over the last six months, up from 52% in January. One in four (24%) said it had got “much worse”, 33% “slightly worse”. Only 8% said “better”. The same proportion – 57% – were pessimistic about the NHS’s future. Asked how they expected it to fare in the next few years, 37% said “worse” and another 20% “much worse”; 21% said better.
The polling may reflect the NHS’s worst winter crisis in years. Record numbers of patients were forced to endure long waits – often on a trolley – and more than half of hospitals went on alert because they could not cope.
The over-75s were the only group in which more people thought the NHS would get better (41%) than worse (35%). Conservatives were less pessimistic (50%) than Labour voters (61%).
“This survey shows the public is realising that the NHS is buckling under the strain of meeting rising demand for services and maintaining standards of care,” said Chris Ham, chief executive of the King’s Fund health thinktank.
A separate international study by Ipsos Mori found that Britons are more pessimistic about their healthcare system than people in 22 other countries. Almost half (47%) of Britons believe the quality of the healthcare they and their families can access will get worse in coming years.
However, Britons are also among the most positive internationally about the care they currently receive. Some 69% say that they and their family get good quality healthcare, well above the 47% seen across the 23 countries.
“Britain’s love for the NHS is one of our defining characteristics, and we remain among the most positive countries in the world about the quality of care we receive. But we’re also the most worried for the future of the service. This fear has been growing and is now at record levels”, said Kate Duxbury, Ipsos Mori’s head of healthcare research.
A spokesman for NHS England said: “It’s welcome news that a far higher proportion of people in Britain than in other countries rate the quality of their healthcare highly. And it’s noticeable that those people who use the NHS most and who therefore know most about it – the over-75s – are in fact the most optimistic about its future.”
He pointed to the very high scores recorded by 12 different types of NHS services in December under the “friends and family” ratings test. Dental care got the highest patient satisfaction rating, at 97%, while even the lowest scores – 86% for both A&E and mental health care – were still high.
Meanwhile, doctors and hospital bosses want some of the £700m-£1bn of extra government money expected to be given to social care in this week’s budget to be used to help cover the cost of “bed blocking”. They want to ensure that local councils do not use the cash to fill other holes in their budgets and ensure that any extra funding benefits both social care and the NHS.
The call has come from NHS Providers, which speaks for hospitals, and medical royal colleges representing A&E doctors, surgeons and hospital physicians. They want Philip Hammond, the chancellor, to make the money conditional on councils spending it on people who have had a spell in hospital, so that it reduces the 723,000 bed-days a year lost because patients who are medically fit to leave cannot be safely discharged for lack of social care support.
“If extra money is coming into social care it should either be spent on local authority packages of care or, if this doesn’t happen, on the alternative – the cost of keeping patients in hospital,” the four organisations said, in a joint statement to the Observer.
“Any solution to benefit NHS patients must be clear, simple and not capable of being manipulated. Local authorities would receive more funding if they support the NHS and less if they don’t.”
NHS poll finds public think service getting worse
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