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.

There are some tentative signs that the NHS may be improving. Hospital waiting lists fell by around 200,000 in the year following the 2024 general election – down from a record high of 7.8 million in 2023. GP appointments have risen by 8.3 million in the past year.

But the picture is uneven. In October 2025, waits of over four weeks for GP appointments were at a record 4.1 million, and 12-hour waits in A&E hit an all-time high in January 2026.

A report from the Health Foundation suggested that the drop in waiting lists isn’t only because hospitals are treating more patients. Instead, some of the decrease may be because........

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