NHS dissatisfaction is falling – is this a turning point or is something else at play?

For a health service long defined by waiting lists, staff shortages and steady erosion of public confidence, the latest figures offer something unfamiliar: a sense that the mood is shifting. A new survey by The King’s Fund and Nuffield Trust records a six-point increase in satisfaction, and the sharpest fall in dissatisfaction with the NHS since 1998.

Puzzlingly, while overall satisfaction rose, there was no corresponding rise in satisfaction with each individual NHS service: GPs, A&E, dentistry and hospital care. There are two possible explanations for this.

The first explanation is that services did genuinely improve, but the survey simply did not poll enough people about each individual service to reliably detect small improvements.