Patients repeatedly report much higher levels of satisfaction with services than the public as a whole, the NHS Confederation, which covers all National Health Service organisations, said yesterday.

A clue to the yawning gap between public and patient satisfaction may lie in the fact that the area where the two most closely agree is family doctor services - where 81 per cent of patients polled last winter were satisfied as were 80 per cent of the public. Family doctors are, by far, the part of the health service that the public most frequently encounters in its report.