Verdicts · Health
What the UK thinks about health
Settled referendums
26
since Jun 2026
Votes cast
3,003
all time, on health
This week
0
votes · 0 referendums settled
Written opinions
110
all time, left by voters
Last week's opinion highlightThe most respected opinion last week
“Yes, with a heavy heart. Workers should have leverage, but NHS and emergency strikes hit the people who cannot wait. They have struck, won, and struck again. The public absorbs the cost. Police and army already cannot strike because the protective function cannot stop. Patient safety is the floor. That floor comes first.”
HardCompact, debating Yes on “Should strike action be completely banned for NHS and emergency service workers?” · read the thread →
4
Respects
Most respected on health last week
- 1.HardCompact4 respects
- 2.BenL2 respects
- 3.Fletch1 respect
- 4.constancia1 respect
- 5.Hello1 respect
Who answered last week
The 463 placed voters lean Centre Right overall.
H. Left7%
Left21%
C. Left7%
Centre4%
C. Right10%
Right43%
H. Right8%
Regions last week
LondonC. Right
South EastCentre
South WestC. Right
ScotlandCentre
North WestC. Right
East of EnglandCentre
YorkshireCentre
West MidlandsC. Right
East MidlandsC. Left
North EastRight
Northern IrelandRight
Votes each week
0so far this week
81727 Jul
3 Aug
25210 Aug
17 Aug
45224 Aug
31 Aug
All-time health highlights
Biggest landslide
YES 89%
Should Yvette Cooper demand full transparency on whether NHS waiting list falls reflect real patient treatment?
89% of 124 votes went the same way.
Closest result
NO 51%
Should strike action be completely banned for NHS and emergency service workers?
Decided by 2 points.
Most debated
NO 51%
Should strike action be completely banned for NHS and emergency service workers?
18 written opinions.
Last week
1 settled · 452 votes
0% NO
Majority against
YES 49%
452 votes
0 skipped
by @BenL⏱ Ended 29 Aug 2026
Should strike action be completely banned for NHS and emergency service workers?
The verdict
“Patient safety is the floor” was the sharpest line in the room, but the ban lost by a whisker: a narrow No victory in a debate that never settled whether safety or bargaining rights came first.
Every health verdict
- NO 51%Should strike action be completely banned for NHS and emergency service workers?“Patient safety is the floor” was the sharpest line in the room, but the ban lost by a whisker: a narrow No victory in a debate that never settled whether safety or bargaining rights came first.
- NO 65%Is the NHS making meaningful progress on waiting lists?The list budged; the chamber did not: No won by nearly two to one, while its best-respected voice warned that “full recovery to pre-pandemic waiting list sizes would take a very long time.”
- YES 61%Should NHS trust boards take direct responsibility for AI scribe safety as national rules are loosened?A clear three-to-two majority backed handing trusts direct responsibility for AI scribe safety, yet the most striking thing is how thin the argument got as the stakes rose - even sceptics conceded trusts are "best placed to spot issues.
- NO 61%Would Andy Burnham succeed where others failed in fixing social care?Two to one, the chamber decided Andy Burnham will not be the prime minister who finally cracks social care, extending a decade-long pattern of scepticism that has outlasted several occupants of Downing Street already.
- NO 78%Should taxpayers fund gender affirming surgery and medication?A three-to-one rout, and one where the winning side did not merely out-vote the other but out-argued it too: the floor's single most-respected line came from the No benches, dismissing the premise outright rather than weighing costs against outcomes.
- NO 51%Should the NHS become more like Australia's and become half public half private?A question that split the chamber almost exactly down the middle came out No by the narrowest of margins, with the most-respected argument on the page actually making the Yes case — that a two-tier NHS already exists in practice.
- NO 75%Should the child puberty blocker trial go ahead?Three to one against, and the chamber's most respected voices did not equivocate: the top-rated argument called the trial part of a pattern of "mutilation" that "needs to stop," and it drew five times the backing of anything the Yes side could muster.
- NO 69%Should all drugs be decriminalised?The chamber's most respected argument was also its least persuasive one: the top-rated opinion called the war on drugs a proven failure, yet two in three voters rejected decriminalisation anyway, 96 votes to 43.
- YES 65%Should the NHS shift more care from hospitals to the community?On a question the government's own 10-year plan treats as settled policy, the chamber largely agreed with the planners: two to one for shifting NHS care out of hospitals and into the community, with barely a flicker of generational disagreement.
- YES 89%Should Yvette Cooper demand full transparency on whether NHS waiting list falls reflect real patient treatment?Nearly everyone who turned out wanted the numbers checked, but the sharpest tell was who didn't quite believe checking would change anything — a scepticism that ran deeper among women than men, in a chamber otherwise close to unanimous.
- YES 71%Should Parliament pass the NHS Modernisation Bill 2026?Every age band backed the NHS Modernisation Bill by a comfortable margin, but the chamber split down a much starker line than the years: this passed by a wide margin overall, yet women turned against it while men carried it almost two to one. That gender gulf looks less like a verdict on restructuring in the abstract than a proxy fight over who the NHS actually serves and who ends up defending it against cuts dressed up as reform.
- YES 58%Should junk food advertising be banned before 9pm?A clear if not overwhelming majority backed extending the watershed beyond television, with the chamber's oldest voters most convinced that advertising restrictions belong alongside the 2025 rules while younger and middle-aged voters stayed genuinely split.
- NO 68%Should the government offer weight-loss injections to unemployed people to boost workforce participation?On a question that dressed up welfare conditionality in a clinical wrapper, the chamber declined the offer decisively, with roughly two in three voters saying no to state-funded jabs for the unemployed rather than accept the York study's productivity logic at face value.
- YES 69%Should we reform the NHS so it works like the system in countries with better health outcomes per £ like FR, DE or CH?A system founded on faith in universal, tax-funded care found much of its own base ready to borrow from its continental rivals, with two in three voters here backing a move toward the insurance-style models of France, Germany or Switzerland.
- YES 74%Should the UK offer meningitis B vaccine to all 15-year-olds?A vote on a routine adolescent jab still carries the scars of the last vaccine debate: three in four voters backed extending MenB cover to 15-year-olds, but the one demographic that split clean down the middle was the 45-54s, the group most likely to be parents of teenagers themselves.
- YES 67%Should the UK introduce a performers list for pharmacists?Two in three voters backed a performers list for pharmacists, but the generational split tells the real story: the young and mid-career overwhelmingly want the check, while the 55-64s were the only group to turn against it.
- YES 70%Should the NHS adopt its new Quality Strategy to prioritise patient safety, effectiveness and experience?Approval for a technocratic NHS strategy is easy to win among men, who backed it three to two, but women who voted split the other way, against it two to one — a rare gender inversion in a health referendum.
- NO 59%Should GPs in England take collective action against the 2026/27 contract?A vote that pits a nearly unanimous BMA ballot against a much more sceptical general public: the 99% of GPs who rejected the contract find little echo among voters here, who split against collective action by a solid 18-point margin.
- YES 73%Should the government launch its 10-year NHS reform plan to integrate health, social care and community services?Rare is the referendum where the generations agree, but here they nearly did: three in four voters backed May's 10-year NHS integration plan, with only the mildest of wobbles as the age brackets climbed.
- YES 71%Should the government implement its 10 Year Capital Plan for Health and Social Care?Rarely does an NHS spending plan unite the generations, but here the 65s-and-over — presumably the group with most at stake in crumbling wards and delayed care — were unanimous, while every other age band still backed the plan comfortably.
Show all 26 verdicts ↓
- YES 55%Should the NHS fund school-based obesity reduction programmes?A prevention agenda that sounds unimpeachable in a 10-Year Health Plan turned out to be a much narrower call in practice, with Britain here splitting closer to a coin toss than a consensus, 46 to 38 for funding school obesity programmes through the NHS.
- YES 59%Should the NHS scrap its £330m Palantir contract and seek a UK alternative?A modest majority for tearing up Palantir's NHS contract, but the closeness masks a real split: the 25-34s, usually first to distrust anything data-related, were exactly torn down the middle.
- NO 69%Should the Department of Health approve NHS capital projects worth up to £300m without Treasury sign-off?Trust in Whitehall to loosen its own purse strings turned out to be an age thing: only the under-35s were persuaded, before a wall of older sceptics buried the idea two to one.
- YES 59%Should the UK trial faster routes for new medicines with the pharma industry?Yes carried the vote 59-41, but the chamber split hard by gender: men backed faster medicine pipelines by two to one, women rejected them by roughly the same margin.
- NO 55%Does the government need to make the NHS App compatible with Huawei's HarmonyOS?A narrow no, but with a generational hinge: the youngest voters in the chamber were the only group to back Huawei compatibility with any conviction, while everyone over 45 who voted said no.
- YES 63%Should the government publish a modern services framework for 24/7 palliative care?Yes carried the chamber 22-13, a clear if not overwhelming win, with support hardening steadily as voters got older.