Most adults are pessimistic about future of NHS
AMAJORITY of adults believe the NHS and health and social care will get worse over the next five years, according to a new survey.
In Beaufort’s latest opinion poll Welsh adults were asked whether they thought the services would improve, stay the same or get worse over the next five years, after the June general election.
Nearly six in 10 (59%) expect the NHS and health and social care to get worse under the new UK Government, according to the survey, while just one in 10 (12%) believe it will improve.
Almost a quarter of people (23%) expect no change, and another 6% say they don’t know.
The Welsh Government said it did not want to respond to the survey as health is a devolved matter.
It pointed towards the latest findings from the National Survey for Wales from April 2016 to March 2017, which recorded the opinions of 10,000 randomlyselected adults aged 16 and over across Wales on a range of topics.
They were asked to rate health services on a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being the worst, and the average rating for health was 6.2.
The survey said the score was not significantly different from previous years.
Of those who had recent experience of the health service, 90% told the National Survey for Wales that they were satisfied with the care they received from their GP, 91% were satisfied with the care received at their last NHS hospital appointment and 87% were satisfied with the service they received from the emergency ambulance service.
In the Beaufort survey, which interviewed around 1,000 adults over 16 in various locations around Wales last month, 35 to 54-year-olds were most likely to be pessimistic, with 65% of this age group believing the NHS and health and social care services would get worse in future.
Younger people were somewhat less pessimistic, with 53% of 16 to 34-year-olds saying they thought things would get worse, compared with 59% overall.
According to Beaufort, regionally, those living in north Wales were most likely to believe the situation would worsen under the new UK Government (67%), whereas people in south Wales, living in the Valleys and Cardiff and the south-east, were slightly more likely than average to believe that NHS and health and social care services might improve (14%) compared with 12% overall.