Patients able to provide feedback about dental practices
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- Published: Wednesday, 01 April 2015 09:16
- Written by News Editor
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The GDS Regulations have been amended from today so that dentists must give all NHS patients who attend their practice ‘the opportunity to provide feedback about the service received from the practice through the Friends and Family Test’. From 1 April 2015, it has been expanded to NHS dental practices, ambulance services, patient transport services, acute hospital outpatients and day cases.
NHS England says the Friends and Family Test (FFT) ‘is an important feedback tool that supports the fundamental principle that people who use NHS services should have the opportunity to provide feedback on their experience. It asks people if they would recommend the services they have used and offers a range of responses. When combined with supplementary follow-up questions, the FFT provides a mechanism to highlight both good and poor patient experience. This kind of feedback is vital in transforming NHS services and supporting patient choice’.
It was launched in April 2013, and the FFT question has been asked in all NHS inpatient and A&E departments across England and, since October 2013, all providers of NHS funded maternity services. Since it began, the FFT has produced more than 5 million pieces of feedback.
The FFT is now being rolled out to additional areas of NHS care making the opportunity to leave feedback possible in almost all NHS services. The FFT has just become available to many additional patients, going live in 8000 GP practices across England from 1 December and in all NHS-funded mental health and community health services from 1 January. The feedback gathered through the FFT is being used in NHS organisations across the country to stimulate local improvement and empower staff to carry out the sorts of changes that make a real difference to patients and their care.
While the results will not be statistically comparable against other organisations because of the various data collection methods, FFT will continue to provide a broad measure of patient experience that can be used alongside other data to inform service improvement and patient choice.
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