British Social Attitudes survey 2011: public satisfaction with the NHS and its services
The topline results and satisfaction trends relating to the NHS and health care issues from the British Social Attitudes survey 2011.
Introduction
Since 1983 the British Social Attitudes survey has asked a sample of the public about their views and feeling towards the NHS and health care issues generally. This survey was carried out over the summer of 2011 and provides an important snapshot of satisfaction with the way in which the NHS runs and with important parts of its services such as general practice, inpatients and outpatients.
Here we present the topline results and satisfaction trends from the survey, and explore possible reasons for changes in satisfaction in 2011. These, and the results from a number of other health and health care questions (as well as the rest of the survey questions), will be published later in 2012 in the British Social Attitudes 29th report.
You can see findings from the latest survey in our British Social Attitudes survey 2012 pages.
Satisfaction with the NHS overall - results
The results show that overall satisfaction with the way the NHS across Britain runs nowadays fell by 12 percentage points from 70 per cent in 2010 to 58 per cent in 2011.
Satisfaction with the NHS overall - more detail
Satisfaction with NHS services - results
Satisfaction with individual NHS services also fell - for example, for GPs, the fall was by 4 percentage points, and for accident and emergency services, by 7 points.
Satisfaction with NHS services - more detail
Why has satisfaction fallen between 2010 and 2011?
We present a number of possible explanations of why satisfaction has fallen and what that might indicate about the quality of NHS services as perceived by the public.
