Almost half of parents with under-18s do not feel confident they can access timely day-to-day medical care for their children in the face of the current NHS crisis, a poll suggests. The survey of 1,028 users of the parenting website Mumsnet also found 40% are not confident they could access emergency care for their children if they needed it.
Meanwhile, a third (33%) said they had been unable to get a GP appointment for their child in the previous three months, while 16% took their child or children to A&E because they felt there was no other way of getting treatment. Of those parents who did take their children to A&E, nearly half (49%) waited more than four hours to be admitted, discharged or transferred.
Meanwhile, 70% of parents said they had waited longer than five minutes when calling 111, and more than half (51%) said they have experienced difficulty generally when trying to use the service for their children. When asked who was responsible for the current crisis in the NHS, 86% said the present government.
Parents in Wales and Scotland also mainly blamed the UK Government rather than devolved administrations, with 64% of parents in Scotland and Wales saying so. It comes amid warnings from senior doctors that the NHS is under intolerable pressure and NHS trusts and as ambulance services call critical incidents across the country.
On Wednesday, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak pledged that NHS “waiting lists will fall and people will get the care they need more quickly”. The Government has blamed high numbers of flu cases, Covid-19 and Strep A fears for the particular pressures the NHS faced over Christmas.
However, health leaders say the problems are longstanding and include thousands of staff vacancies and a lack of hospital beds. In his first major speech of 2023, Mr Sunak said the issues facing the NHS were “at the forefront of everyone’s minds”, adding: “I know there are challenges in A&E – people are understandably anxious when they see ambulances queuing outside hospitals.
“You should know we’re taking urgent action: increasing bed capacity by 7,000 more hospital beds and more people cared for at home; providing new funding to discharge people into social care and the community, freeing up beds and the NHS are working urgently on further plans for A&E and ambulances.”
The NHS in England has previously estimated that the waiting list for planned treatment – currently standing at around 7m people – will be reducing by around March 2024. Justine Roberts, founder and chief executive officer of Mumsnet, said of the poll results: “It is deeply worrying that so many parents do not feel confident they would be able to access the necessary medical care for their children – something you’d expect to be a minimum standard in the UK in 2023.
“But when you take their experiences into account, it’s hardly surprising. We hear every day from Mumsnet users unable to get GP appointments for their children, or forced to sit for hours with sick kids in overcrowded A&E departments. It’s also clear that parents lay the blame for this squarely at the door of Rishi Sunak and his government.
“If he does not take action immediately to show that he grasps the scale of the NHS crisis and is willing to take the necessary action to fix it, he’s likely to pay the price at the next election.”
The poll was carried out between December 15 and 28 and asked about accessing NHS care in the previous three months.
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