Friend and Family Test
29 January 2013
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Sheffield Teaching Hospitals has launched the new NHS Friends and Family Test that asks patients if they would recommend the ward where they have received treatment to their loved ones.
The new nationwide test is a way of gathering patient feedback about their experience and helping to drive further improvements in local hospital services.
After the patient has been told they are ready to be discharged from hospital, they will be given a Friends and Family feedback card which asks the following question:
“How likely are you to recommend our ward/A&E department to friends and family if they needed similar care or treatment?”
They will be invited to respond to this question by giving an answer along a six-point scale ranging from ‘extremely likely’ to ‘extremely unlikely’.
A simple follow-up question on the card asks why they chose the answer they did, so that the Trust can find out a bit more about their experience and understand in greater depth what their care was like.
The patient will be asked to complete the feedback card before they leave hospital wherever possible so that they can pop it in a special postbox on the ward or in the A&E department before they leave.
If they prefer, patients can choose to respond later either online, by Smartphone using a special QR code or on a postage paid card. The individual answers the patients give are confidential and staff will not be able to identify who they are.
Sir Andrew Cash, Chief Executive, Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said: “We already have a number of ways in which patients can feedback their views on our care and services and we have made numerous improvements as a result of patients’ or visitors’ suggestions. The Friends and Family Test will be a particularly powerful indicator of where we are getting it right or where we have more work to do. This is because we are asking if a patient would recommend the ward or department to the people who matter to them most.”
“The responses we will get back from patients will be combined with other sources of information, to help build on good performance and to make the improvements that patients want to see from our Trust. We are expecting to collect more than 100,000 responses in a year and every month each ward will receive a summary of their feedback so that they can share it with their teams”
The Family and Friends Test has begin in the Accident and Emergency Department at the Northern General Hospital and the surgical wards at both the Northern General and Royal Hallamshire Hospital. It will be rolled out to other areas of the hospitals by April 2013.
