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Mandatory requirements
From 1 December 2014, it is a contractual requirement that all NHS funded services implement the NHS Friends and Family Test (FFT). They must:
• Provide an opportunity for people who use the service to give anonymous feedback through the FFT.
• Use the standard wording of the FFT question and the responses exactly as set out below. NHS England has published advice on how feedback can be collected from people who may not be able to answer the FFT question on their own.
• Include at least one follow up question which allows the opportunity to provide free text.
• Submit data to NHS England each month.
• Publish results locally.
Click here for full NHS FFT guidance
GPs click here for full NHS FFT guidance
What is the initial FFT question?
For GP practices:
“We would like you to think about your recent experiences of our service.
How likely are you to recommend our GP practice to friends and family if they needed similar care or treatment?”
For other NHS services:
“We would like you to think about your recent experiences of our service.
How likely are you to recommend our service to friends and family if they needed similar care or treatment?”
The responses are:
- Extremely likely
- Likely
- Neither likely nor unlikely
- Unlikely
- Extremely unlikely
- Don’t know
We also provide an accessible version of the FFT question, for use with anyone who may have difficulty with the wording and layout of the standard question.
Additional Questions
Free text questions:
As long as there is at least one free text follow-up question, services can decide which follow-up questions to ask, and how many, as long as the FFT remains short and simple. NHS England does not see the responses to these questions, and they are not published centrally.
Demographic questions:
Services should consider asking demographic questions to collect equality and diversity information for their own internal analysis that ensures they are getting feedback from a reasonable spread of their local population, and to enable comparisons between the experiences of different groups. This does not need to be reported to NHS England.
Question hierarchy:
The FFT question can be used as part of a larger survey, but it must be asked first, before other questions. This is to avoid responses being unduly affected by the preceding questions and so that people using the service have the opportunity to provide feedback as soon as possible after their care experience.
Data Submission
Services must submit monthly to NHS England:
• The number of responses in each category
• The number of responses collected by each method
• Services must submit data through UNIFY
• GP practices must submit through CQRS
The free text responses, and any additional information collected via the FFT, should not be submitted to NHS England.
Services must publish their own results locally and they can publish their free text comments locally in an anonymised format. If the practice does decide to publish free text comments, patients must be able to opt out of their comment being published.
This can be achieved by using the “free text with confirmation” question when creating a project in RaTE.