NHS receptionists take the blame for struggling services, according to a major new analysis of patient feedback.

Not many more than half of words used to describe receptionists were positive – compared with 98% of descriptions of surgeons, researchers found.

And even the positive words were luke-warm compared with the glowing praised issued for surgeons.

The findings come from a study by linguists at Lancaster University where computer software was used to analyse 29 million words written in 228,000 comments posted on the NHS Choices website.

Praise for receptionists would typically describe them as “pleasant,” the analysis showed. A nurse might be described as “lovely.”

However, surgeons were praised as “brilliant” and “outstanding.”

But receptionists also attracted words such as “useless, rude, unprofessional, unhelpful, arrogant, patronising, aggressive and terrible.”

These words were frequently deployed when a receptionist could not give an immediate appointment or asked questions to determine how urgent a request was.

Researcher Professor Paul Baker said: “Rather than suggesting that receptionists need retraining or that surgeons deserve pay rises, we instead noted that feedback is very much linked to expectations and constraints around different staff roles.

“So jobs that involve saving your life or delivering a new life are seen as more impressive than the more support-based work carried out by nurses and receptionists. Feedback has a role bias in other words.”