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RECORDS, DATA & DOCUMENTS
Avoiding the temptation to ‘tick the box’
With primary and community care coming online for the Friends & Family Test, the temptation is to tick the boxes, rather than looking for quality and proper reporting, argues Jim Ward of Good4Health.
In
July, NHS England issued new guidelines for the FFT, which impact on existing
providers as well as new areas coming on board from December to March and beyond. Unlike previous guidance, response rates have not been specified. The emphasis is on offering every patient an opportunity to provide feedback, as well as asking enough patients to ensure a balanced view of the service.
The temptation for many providers is to simply fulfil the absolute minimum required – to pay lip-service to the requirements, since no extra money is being provided. This means they will collect minimal feedback, which could easily show a misbalance towards negativity.
It also misses the very real benefits that can come from quality feedback and analysis of the comments made by patients. Feedback individualised to a clinician is a goldmine for service improvement, training and accreditation.
In a Pathfinder project over the past six months across the East Midlands, in partnership with Greater East Midlands CSU (GEMCSU), we provided a systemised service focusing on SMS as a feedback methodology. This is now expanding into a three-level provision under the banner of GEM-VOICE. This allows practices to offer an easy way to provide the
66 | national health executive Nov/Dec 14 FFT, from a few hundred pounds.
‘Foundation’ level is a web-based facility to allow practices to offer patients an easy way to provide online feedback. We have gone way beyond other simple systems by providing enhanced analysis capability, as well as simple and focused input.
‘Enhanced’ takes it a stage further, with systemised tools such as SMS, email-to-web and cloud apps – such as those shown above, for adults and children – plus other methods such as tablets.
‘Professional’ adds ‘thematic analysis’, enabling automated categorisation of comments into research-based code-frames such as safety, pain management, appointment times and so on. This provides a comprehensive view of the issues that matter to patients.
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 meaningful areas.
Information is available in real-time on the Synapta portal, with specific analytics and reporting and (at the ‘professional’ level) thematic analysis of the comments.
Cloud apps are a real benefit to every part of the NHS for feedback. They allow patients to either be sent a link by email or text, or to text in a keyword to a free-to-text number, bringing back a unique link to a smartphone browser instance that looks like an app – as in the picture above.
It means that authoring expensive iPhone or Android apps has been bypassed in a flexible system, 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.
Additional questions can also be asked at no extra cost.
Research has shown that people who take part in a service do value being asked their opinion. It makes them feel valued and part of a community. But the feeling that they have been left-out can produce a negative effect.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
E:
jim@good4health.co.uk Tw: @Good4HEALTHUK
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