Half of people in Finland said they believe public health services will care for their needs, according to an Yle-commissioned poll carried out by Taloustutkimus.
The poll asked whether respondents agreed with the statement "I can trust that I will receive the care I need from the public healthcare system."
Fifty percent of respondents completely or somewhat agreed with this statement.
On the other hand, nearly 40 percent said they didn't trust that the public system could provide the necessary care. Eleven percent did not express an opinion in the matter.
Men took a more favourable view of public health services than women. Fifty-eight percent of males said they believed the public system would take care of them, compared to 43 percent of females.
Liina-Kaisa Tynkkynen, a chief researcher at public health authority THL, said there was no clear explanation for the gender disparity.
"In any case women use health services somewhat more than men, so they have more experience," she said.
Studies have indicated that trust in public health services has declined in recent years.
Tynkkynen said the increase in private health insurance policies can be interpreted as a vote of no confidence in the Finnish public system. The same thing can be said for employer-provided occupational healthcare, which has been expanding since the 1990s, according to the THL researcher.
"It's to some extent signalled that employers don't trust that these [public] services will be available when they're needed."
In Tynkkynen's view, the legitimacy of the entire public healthcare system rests on broad popular trust.
"It's sort of the glue that holds our public system together. If trust starts to significantly erode, it can call the entire system into question. But maybe we're still quite far from that," Tynkkynen said.
Taloustutkimus carried out the poll from April 22-23, which is a week after the government announced its latest round of austerity measures that included cuts to regional healthcare authorities. A total of 1,106 people responded to the survey, which has a margin of error of three percentage points both ways.
Last year, human rights group Amnersty criticised inequality in Finnish healthcare, stating the system has failed to stop a deterioration in standards for people reliant on public healthcare.
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