GPs have responded to Jeremy Hunt's criticisms of how they care for patients by accusing the health secretary of trying to damage the public's trust in them.

In a poll for the Guardian, four in five family doctors say they believe Hunt is deliberately seeking to undermine trust through a series of sometimes trenchant attacks on them, and some complain that they are being used as "political scapegoats".

The poll found that 83% of respondents agreed with the statement that "Jeremy Hunt is seeking to undermine public trust in GPs", and 3% disagreed.

An even larger proportion (88%) rejected Hunt's repeated claim that the contract agreed between Labour ministers and GPs in 2004 – which meant family doctors no longer had to provide out-of-hours care – was a key contributor to greater overcrowding in hospital A&E units.

The 1,008 GPs polled, selected to be representative of the UK's 40,000 family doctors, were asked whether they agreed or disagreed that the health secretary was right to say that changes in the 2004 GP contract were a key contributor to the current load on emergency departments.

Just 4% said they agreed or strongly agreed, 25% disagreed and another 63% strongly disagreed. The British Medical Association (BMA), the doctors' trade union, has said there is no evidence for Hunt's claim.

Many GPs have become frustrated and resentful because they feel they have been unfairly portrayed in recent months as the cause of problems in the NHS. That anger was underlined in the poll, with 94% of participants saying they agreed or strongly agreed that "GPs are being unfairly criticised for political purposes".

The participants belong to the Omnibus panel of GPs run by Doctors.net.uk, a professional networking site to which almost all of the UK's 250,000 doctors of all types belong. They are representative by age, gender, region and seniority of all family doctors. The Department of Health (DoH) said the poll was not reliable because leading questions had been asked.

Two weeks ago an alliance of 10 NHS organisations called for an end to what is called unfair and sustained criticism of the service. Hunt has criticised GPs for not providing more out-of-hours care, doing too little to look after elderly patients, and making patients wait too long for an appointment.

In September Hunt claimed that care of frail older people by GP practices was so inadequate that in some cases A&E staff were more familiar with patients' health problems than their own family doctors.

The health secretary has also overseen the appointment of the first chief inspector of primary care to monitor standards at England's 8,000 GP surgeries and issue Ofsted-style ratings.

One GP who took part in the poll told Doctors.net.uk: "I feel GPs are being used as political scapegoats, and the propaganda being voiced is to the detriment of patient care."

Another said they were "frustrated with the endless GP bashing", and a third said: "The coalition is dripping poison into the media about the overload at A&Es with the intention of using this as a stick to beat GPs with."

Dr Tim Ringrose, chief executive of Doctors.net.uk, said: "Some commentators have described 2013 as an annus horribilis for the NHS. Our research suggests that this has certainly been the case for many GPs in terms of the way they feel they have been treated by the government.

"A lot of the rhetoric around NHS services has been unnecessarily adversarial towards GPs. This has caused great distress to GPs who have embraced the new clinical commissioning environment and are continuing to work hard to deliver the highest standards of care to their patients."

Dr Mark Porter, chair of the BMA's ruling council, said: "All politicians must stop using the NHS as a political football. There is currently a damaging climate where NHS staff in particular are used for partisan point-scoring rather than as partners in a joint effort to address the real workload and financial crisis undermining the health service."

GPs are undertaking 340m consultations a year, 40m more than in 2010. Dr Chaand Nagpaul, chair of the BMA's GPs committee, said the failure to fund general practice to respond to that increase had left all surgeries struggling to cope.

In the survey, 71% of participants said they believed that cradle-to-grave NHS care regardless of ability to pay was likely to disappear in England in the forseeable future, and 74% said they feared that the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition "has an ultimate agenda to tender provision of GP services to large private providers in England".

The Department of Health said it was "not a reliable poll as doctors were presented with very leading statements which contravene the code of conduct set out by the Market Research Society that respondents should not be led towards a particular view".

A spokesman added: "Jeremy Hunt is a strong advocate of GPs who has scrapped 40% of the targets that previously bogged them down in bureaucracy and freed them to give more personal care, but we make no apology for pushing for greater transparency over pay and higher standards for patients."