Using feedback to deliver better care

The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Wes Streeting, has stated that ‘the NHS is broken’. With almost daily national news stories reporting the drive to improve NHS spend, quality outcomes and patient experience it is critical that senior nurses are aware of patient feedback relating to the services they lead.

The King's Fund and the Nuffield Trust (Taylor et al, 2025) have just published an analysis based on the 2024 British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey. The report concludes that public satisfaction with the NHS is currently at a record low: only 21% of British adults reported being ‘very’ or ‘quite’ satisfied with the way the NHS runs, representing the lowest level of satisfaction recorded since the survey began in 1983 and marking a steep decline of 39 percentage points since 2019.

Dissatisfaction with the NHS in 2024, the report states, is at a record high of 59%, an increase from 52% in 2023; this is considered statistically significant and builds on what was already the highest dissatisfaction level seen in the 40 years of the survey. Some examples of more detailed service experience include: