Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government notes the position from the British Social Attitudes survey (BSA) which asks members of the public to rate how satisfied they are with “the way in which the NHS runs nowadays”.

We recognise that the NHS has been under significant pressure in recent years, in particular due to pressures arising from COVID-19.

The ongoing impact of addressing the COVID-19 pandemic has meant that many health services had to be suspended or reduced in scope and scale. This has affected almost all aspects of NHS planned care and as a result of this there are many people who are waiting longer for the care they need. Addressing the backlog of care, while continuing to meet the ongoing urgent health and care needs of the country, is a top priority for the Scottish Government.

We continue to prioritise investment in our NHS to support remobilisation and reform and to deliver world-class, sustainable services for the whole of Scotland. This is underlined by our latest Budget which provides £18 billion for Health and Social Care and takes forward our commitment to increase spending on the NHS in Scotland by at least 20% over the course of this parliament.

As part of our 100 days commitments, we published an NHS Recovery Plan in August 2021 which commits more than £1 billion of targeted investment for the recovery and renewal of our health service. This sets out our plans and key ambitions to address the backlogs of care by March 2026, which includes supporting an increase in capacity to deliver inpatient and day case procedures, outpatient activity, and diagnostics, which will be supported by the implementation of sustainable improvements and new models of care.

Alongside this, NHS Scotland staffing levels are at a record high and have increased for ten consecutive years. However, we recognise that our NHS has experienced unprecedented pressures since the Covid-19 pandemic. Our £300m of new support to help services deal with system pressures over recent months along with the £1bn-backed NHS Recovery Plan introduced a range of direct workforce investments and new measures to enhance Boards’ capacity for both domestic and international recruitment. Various commitments from these plans, such as the recruitment of 1,000 additional healthcare support workers, have already been achieved. We are continuing to implement vital workforce investments at speed.

In terms of the wider situation in Scotland, the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey (SSAS) asks similar, but not identical, questions to the BSA and is due to report in Autumn this year. The SSAS did not run in 2020 due to COVID restrictions and was run in 2021 as a telephone survey which means that results for the 2021 SSAS may not be directly comparable with the previous SSAS findings from 2019.

Other sources reporting information of this kind are the Scottish Household Survey (SHS) and the Health and Care Experience survey (HACE).

The most recent Scottish Household Survey asked participants to rate satisfaction with “local health services”. Whilst this question does not exclusively focus on the NHS, satisfaction was generally positive in Scotland with around 88% of those surveyed reporting they were satisfied with the quality of local health services in 2020. Also from the SHS, 93% of adults trusted “the Health System”, making it the institution that adults were most likely to express trust in. Similarly to the SSAS, the SHS ran in 2020 as a telephone survey, meaning that results for 2020 may not be directly comparable with previous SHS findings.

Scottish Household Survey data collection is ongoing, with 2022 data currently being collected. 2021 data is being processed and is due to be published later in the year.

https://www.gov.scot/publications/scottish-household-survey-2020-telephone-survey-key-findings/

The Health and Care Experience survey (HACE) asks people to rate their experience of using Health and Care services in Scotland which is not the same as asking about people’s attitudes towards health and care services. Similar to the SSAS, the HACE was last run in 2019 with results published in October 2020. The next set of results from the 2021-22 HACE survey will be published in May 2022.

https://www.gov.scot/publications/health-care-experience-survey-2019-20/