Trust in family doctors remains high despite critical assessments of the healthcare reform – survey

50.5% of Ukrainians said they did not feel an improvement after the medical reforms (in particular, the introduction of the NHSU), 24.7% reported an improvement, and another 24.8% hesitated to answer.

At the same time, 64% of respondents said they had encountered unofficial payments in medical institutions, and 52.2% consider the healthcare system corrupt (another 44.3% – “partially corrupt”). This is stated in the results of a survey conducted by the research company Active Group using the SunFlowerSociology online panel.

Active Group director Oleksandr Pozniy noted that, against the backdrop of more critical assessments of the reform, people often separate trust in a specific doctor from trust in the system as a whole.

“We can say that family doctors, especially those who were chosen deliberately and consciously, are trusted. This is quite a common situation, when people may not trust the system but trust a specific doctor they know. At the same time, a reform exists when it changes everyday experience, and although some of the changes have taken place, there is still dissatisfaction with this reform”, – he stressed at a press conference at the Interfax-Ukraine agency on Friday.

According to the study, Ukrainians most often rate the state of the healthcare system as “average” (54.6%), “rather bad” (18.7%) or “very bad” (7.2%); 2.9% said “very good”, and 16.7% – “rather good”.

At the same time, the level of trust in the family doctor remains relatively high: 29.5% of respondents said they trust completely, 61.9% – partially, and 8.6% – do not trust.

The survey also recorded problems with access to medical care and resources at the local level. In particular, 23.8% of respondents believe it is “very easy” to get a consultation with a family doctor, 55.1% – “easy”, 18.1% – “difficult”, 2.9% — “very difficult”. Also, only 10.1% answered that their local hospital has “fully enough” modern equipment and medicines, 45.8% – “partially”, 32.4% – “no”.

In addition, the wait for an appointment with a narrow-profile specialist, according to respondents, exceeds a month in 11.5% of cases, lasts 2–4 weeks in 19.8%, 1-2 weeks in 28.4%, and up to a week in 40.2%.

Active Group founder Andriy Yeremenko linked some of the negative assessments to the scale of households' out-of-pocket expenses.

“In fact, we see that more than 90% pay for treatment one way or another, even though medicine is formally free. If you have no insurance, you still pay – either for medicines or for procedures. That is why the issue of financial accessibility remains key for most families”, – he noted.

According to the survey results, in 2024–2025 68.2% of respondents said they paid for medical services or medicines out of pocket regularly, 25.1% – sometimes, and 6.7% – did not pay.

At the same time, 20.9% said they spend more than 20% of the family budget on medicine, another 23.2% – 11–20%, 39.8% – 5-10%, and 16.1% – less than 5%.

Maksym Urakin, Candidate of Economic Sciences and founder of the information and analytical center Experts Club, commenting on the survey data, said that high shares of treatment costs affect not only well-being but also economic resilience.

“As an economist, I want to stress that medicine is an integral part of a country's economic stability, and when treatment costs erode family budgets, it hits consumption and people's ability to recover. In the international monitoring methodology, it is considered catastrophic if a person spends more than 10% of their budget on medicines. And here we see a signal of a serious financial burden”, – he stressed.

Separately, participants drew attention to the dynamics of medicine prices and the effectiveness of compensation mechanisms. Thus, 52.3% of respondents said that prices for the medicines they buy regularly had “risen significantly”, 43.9% – “risen slightly”, 3.6% – “not changed”, and 0.2% – “fallen”.

Regarding the state program of reimbursement of medicine costs, 13.1% of respondents said they use it, 70.6% – do not use it, and another 16.3% – have heard of it but have not used it. Among those who received medicines under the program, 24.7% said they received them free of charge, and 75.3% – with a co-payment.

Hryhoriy Solonynka, a board member of the public organization “Kyiv Regional Organization VULT” and professor at the private higher education institution “Kyiv Medical University”, believes that the perception of the reform was significantly affected by the pandemic and the full-scale war, but there are also “positive elements”.

“Reforms exist to a certain extent: there are positive aspects, there are negative aspects. But a big imprint on this negative was left, first of all, by the pandemic, then the war — that is, our reforms probably started at the wrong time. But there is a positive side to these reforms, and we see that there is a good 40+ program, screening”, — he said.

The survey also separately assessed the impact of the war on the availability of medical services: 48.1% of respondents said they felt a deterioration in access because of the war, 36.9% — did not, and 15% hesitated to answer. Respondents named the outflow of medical staff (60.3%) as the most acute problem of medicine in wartime, followed by the destruction of infrastructure (22.7%) and the shortage of medicines (13.4%).

The survey was conducted on February 11–12, 2026 using the self-completion method, with a sample of 1,000 respondents aged 18 and over across Ukraine, excluding the temporarily occupied territories. The theoretical statistical error is up to 3.1% at a confidence level of 95%.