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FRIENDS & FAMILY TEST
New guidelines from NHS England for the Friends & Family Test offer opportunities, rather than handcuffs
Helen Sadler of MonkeyWellbeing says the NHS needs to listen to what children are saying about health services. In
July, NHS England issued new guidelines for the Friends and Family Test (FFT),
which impact on existing providers as well as new areas coming on board in October to March and beyond.
Unlike previous guidance, response rates have not been emphasised, taking one part of the potentially onerous gathering of feedback away. Instead, it concentrates on equality, fairness and flexibility.
Some feedback methods are hit on the head, such as token systems, as being too focused on quantitative feedback and potentially demeaning the NHS.
It re-emphasises anonymity; validation; sharing of feedback with patients; a concentration on service improvement; effective feedback; filtering by key demographics; after or within 48 hours of treatment/discharge; and suitable language for those with special needs and children.
Ultimately, the FFT is about giving patients a voice. That voice will indicate potential areas of service improvement, if the provider is able to easily categorise qualitative comments into
58 | national health executive Sep/Oct 14 meaningful areas.
In this article, we concentrate on potential positives that the FFT brings, particularly relating to children. Children have, up till now, been excluded from the format FFT process. Now we need to look at the voice of children directly, as well as through family and carers.
Myself and Janette Vyse from Birmingham Children’s Hospital, along with Colette Datt at the Whittington Hospital and the UCLP group, have been involved in helping children within the NHS for many years. The MonkeyWellbeing series of books and pamphlets has now expanded into help with paper-based ‘Monkey surveys’ suitable for children and the FFT.
Good4HEALTH, Inspiration NW and The 3rd Degree have now worked with us to bring the Monkey FFT to ‘cloud apps’ on mobile phones, tablets and the web. A single SMS to a child (with permission) contains a simple link for them to launch a rich, graphical version of the FFT, using the Monkey methodology of monkey faces from very happy to very sad, as an easy way for children of all ages to provide feedback. They are also provided with a means to leave their own thoughts.
This information is then available in real-time, on the Synapta portal, with specific analytics, reporting and even thematic analysis of the comments into specific NHS code-frames, based for children’s feedback. Providers can then quickly access these analytics, alongside those of adults or other groups.
It means that authoring expensive iPhone or Android apps has been bypassed in a flexible system that is capable of modification to suit different age levels and even special needs groups.
By working with providers, information from their PAS systems can extract the demographic data, such as age, gender and ethnicity, to allow sophisticated filtering of the results, without asking users these questions.
The permission area can be covered with parents/carers to allow them to either answer on their own devices, devices owned by the provider (tablets) or by the mobiles of their parents.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
W:
www.good4health.co.uk W:
www.monkeywellbeing.com
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