Healthcare

A quarter (24%) of Britons believe the government has made a great deal or a fair amount of progress on making it easier to see a GP. However, a significant 65% feel they have not seen much or any progress.

At the heart of the 10 Year Plan the Government is aiming to achieve a triple shift - moving care from hospitals into the community, continuing the move from analogue to digital, and more of a focus on prevention rather than sickness.

Polling released ahead of the publication of the 10-year health plan for the NHS shows experiences of the NHS are broadly good, but variable.

Seven in ten (71%) Britons think abortion should be legal in all or most cases – but this reduces to less than half (46%) of men aged 16-34.

The British public is comfortable rather than uncomfortable with a range of uses of AI in healthcare, particularly reminding patients to book follow-up appointments (61%), helping to identify potential health risks or early signs of disease via wearable devices (48%) and helping to identify those at increased risk of chronic illnesses (48%).

Less than 10% correctly identified that prostate cancer typically has no symptoms in the early stages.

The programme and its evaluation set out to test whether the promising results displayed in earlier pilots and trials were replicated at a larger scale and in real world, busy NHS settings.

Over half of the public (54%) are either unsure if there’s anything they can individually do to prevent antibiotics becoming less effective at treating infections (28%) or incorrectly believe there’s nothing they can personally do (26%).

Nearly three-quarters (73%) of the public support extending the indoor smoking ban to specific outside spaces to protect children and vulnerable people, including playgrounds, outside schools and hospitals. This is followed by introducing a tax on organisation that produce foods high in sugar or salt, with some of the revenue used to fund fresh fruit and vegetables for low income families (62% support) and reducing the number of retailers with licenses to sell tobacco to limit tobacco availability (61% support).