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NHS England to ‘celebrate positive changes’ brought by Friends and Family Test

NHS England has launched a national awards event to celebrate the positive changes brought by its patient feedback scheme, the Friends and Family Test.

The awards cover five categories, including best initiative in Primary Care, which covers GPs and dentists who started collecting FFT data this year, and will champion cases where practices have used the test’s ‘free text’ question to identify and address issues.

Entries are open until 8 January 2016 with the winners announced at a ‘national conference in March’.

Practices who enter also agree to share details of their scheme for NHS England to use as case studies and participate in any publicity drives they launch for the awards.

GP practices are required to publish data monthly, and are at risk of breach notices if they fail to submit data for three consecutive months.

NHS England gave 1,000 practices extra ‘training’ in submitting the test in the first few months after 300 practices failed to meet the contractual requirement for monthly submission.

NHS England says: ’[The awards are] an opportunity to give your team a pat on the back; perhaps get some well-deserved local publicity; share your great ideas with other services; and maybe even scoop an award or certificate to display to your patients.

‘Above all, it is a chance to show that listening to patients can drive real changes in healthcare, delivering improved services.’

But Pulse has already shown practices have been receiving artificially negative scores with patients who respond that they ‘don’t know’ if they’d recommend the service being counted against practices.

Click here, for details on submitting an entry.