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NHS Friends and Family TestImplementation in NHS dental servicesAugust 2014

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• From 1 April 2015 NHS dental service providers will be required to implement the FFT

• The opportunity to give feedback through FFT should be available to every NHS patient

• The feedback highlights good experience as well as opportunities for improvement

• Our approach is to be as flexible as possible• There are a number of mandatory requirements• There are a number of local options

Friends and Family Test

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• There are a small number of requirements that practices must do:

• Provide an opportunity for patients to give anonymous feedback through the FFT

• Use the standard wording of the FFT question and the responses

• Include at least one follow up question which allows the opportunity to provide free text (as a result, “token” systems are not allowed)

• Submit data to NHS England each month – NHS England will issue further guidance on the exact mechanism for doing this

• Publish results locally

The mandatory requirements

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• The wording of the question must be as follows:

“We would like you to think about your recent experience of our service.

How likely are you to recommend our dental practice to friends and family if they needed similar care or treatment?”

Where a person is unable to respond to the initial FFT question, the question may be supplemented and an appropriate response scale used. This is permitted to support inclusion.

The FFT question

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• The responses to the question must be:

• Extremely likely• Likely• Neither likely nor unlikely• Unlikely• Extremely unlikely• Don’t know

The FFT responses

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• Patients do not have to be asked to answer the FFT question after every appointment or interaction with the practice

• Practices can choose their own follow up question and add other questions to focus on issues they want feedback on

• Practices are responsible for the arrangements they make for local collection and publication of results

• Local flexibility is permitted over the degree and frequency of promotion of the FFT

Local options 1

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• NHS England is not prescribing how the results of the FFT are to be used to improve local services

• If their contract allows it, practices can engage a third party supplier to run their FFT

• There may be times when it is not appropriate or possible to pro-actively seek feedback through FFT – eg when it may cause distress

• Patients can be helped to provide feedback through FFT if they need it

Local options 2

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• The opportunity should be available for all patients that receive NHS-funded care or treatment

• Patients do not need to be asked to respond to the FFT question after every interaction

• NHS England has published advice on gathering feedback from people who are unable to respond to the formal FFT question

• Practices may decide to promote FFT to increase uptake, or gain feedback from particular sections of their population

Who and when

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• Practices are encouraged to ask demographic questions to collect equality and diversity information

• This will help to:• ensure they are getting feedback from a

reasonable spread of their local population• enable comparisons between the experiences of

different groups• The data is not reported to NHS England

Demographic data

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• For each practice, NHS England will publish for each month:

• The number of each category of response• The number of responses collected through different

collection modes (eg postcards, websites, SMS etc)• The results – the format for the publication of the results is

under discussion• data to indicate the levels of participation in the FFT within

that organisation relative to its size• we are not setting a response rate target for dental

practices or publishing a formal response rate

National publication

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• Practices are required to publish monthly results locally

• NHS England is not mandating how this is to be done• If the practice wishes to publish free text comments,

patients must be offered an opt out

Local publication

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• You can find the guidance, which includes advice, support and resources:

www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/fft-imp-guid-14.pdf

• NHS England has published a short summary of the guidance for NHS dental service providers, which can be found here: www.england.nhs.uk/ourwork/pe/fft/fft-guidance/

Further information

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