The state of the NHS is the biggest single issue vexing Conservative voters, with more than seven in 10 citing it as a serious concern, and fewer than four in 10 believing the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, should keep his job, a poll suggests.
However, while they were concerned about its administration, relatively few Tory supporters said those fears would put them off voting for the party at the next election.
Q&AWhy is the NHS winter crisis so bad in 2017-18?
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A combination of factors are at play. Hospitals have fewer beds than last year, so they are less able to deal with the recent, ongoing surge in illness. Last week, for example, the bed occupancy rate at 17 of England’s 153 acute hospital trusts was 98% or more, with the fullest – Walsall healthcare trust – 99.9% occupied.
NHS England admits that the service “has been under sustained pressure [recently because of] high levels of respiratory illness, bed occupancy levels giving limited capacity to deal with demand surges, early indications of increasing flu prevalence and some reports suggesting a rise in the severity of illness among patients arriving at A&Es”.
Many NHS bosses and senior doctors say that the pressure the NHS is under now is the heaviest it has ever been. “We are seeing conditions that people have not experienced in their working lives,” says Dr Taj Hassan, the president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine.
The unprecedented nature of the measures that NHS bosses have told hospitals to take – including cancelling tens of thousands of operations and outpatient appointments until at least the end of January – underlines the seriousness of the situation facing NHS services, including ambulance crews and GP surgeries.
The poll suggested Brexit was a close second, and the only other issue to preoccupy more than half of Tory respondents was immigration and asylum.
Of the Tory voters who responded to the online poll, only about a third believed Hunt should remain as health secretary, and more than three-quarters favoured an injection of cash to deal with the winter crisis, perhaps highlighting the damage the government’s handling of it is inflicting on the party.
Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, said: “The truth is you simply can’t trust the Tories with the NHS. This winter we’ve seen cancelled operations, overcrowded hospitals and people stuck in the back of ambulances in the freezing cold. Now even Theresa May’s own supporters are fed up with her hopeless response to the crisis. Years of underfunding, cuts and privatisation have taken their toll on the frontline. Only Labour will rebuild our NHS for the future.”
The campaign group 38 Degrees said the polling, which was carried out for the group by YouGov, demonstrated the “potential political cost of the government’s handling of the NHS”.
Trish Murray, the group’s campaign manager, said the NHS winter crisis was “no accident, but it is an emergency”. She added: “It’s a result of government choices, and polling now shows that, if Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt fail to get a grip on this crisis, Conservative voters will punish them at the ballot box.
“It’s no surprise that voters across the country are angry, with over 6 million people now personally affected by the winter crisis. Three-quarters of the public, and of Conservative voters, support an emergency injection of funds to end this crisis. It’s time the government listened.”
The anaemic support for Hunt among Conservative voters, only 34% of whom backed him, will put pressure on the embattled health secretary. But he will be buoyed by the fact that even fewer – 30% – were willing to go so far as to outright call for his sacking. The largest group was the undecideds – who accounted for 36% of the sample.
Of the 73% of Tories who did citethe NHS as a serious concern, only 15% said it would lead them to refuse to vote Conservative. That would equate to slightly more than a tenth of all Tory voters, the poll suggested.
The YouGov researchers asked questions of 3,283 adults between 16 and 18 January 2018, including 1,147 people who voted Conservative at the 2017 general election. The Department for Health has not responded to a request for comment.
