The Friends and Family Test is to be extended to more NHS and Government services. It currently covers NHS funded acute services for inpatients (including independent sector organisations that provide acute NHS services) and patients discharged from A&E (type 1 & 2). The test is to be extended to maternity services this year. For GP practices, community health services and mental health services FFT, NHS England will expect all service providers to be collecting FFT from January 2015 at the latest,. For other areas of acute care - such as outpatient and day case services - and other areas of primary care - such as pharmacists, dentists and opticians - the latest start date will be April 2015. The question asked is How likely are you to recommend our ward/A&E department/maternity service/etc to friends and family if they needed similar care or treatment?. The answer can be "Extremely Likely", "Likely", "Neither Likely nor Unlikely", "Unlikely", "Extremely Unlikely" or "Don't Know". A score is then calculated monthly or quarterly for the service. The scores can be accessed on the NHS Choices web page for the trust or service or at this NHS England web site. The scoring prescribed works (see here ) as follows: The total number of respondents Nrespond is given by: Nextremely likely + Nlikely + Nneither/nor + Nunlikely + Nextremely unlikely The score is then given by: 100 * (Nextremely likely - Nneither/nor - Nunlikely - Nextremely unlikely) / Nrespond This scoring has a number of peculiar properties.
- It makes no difference whether you answer "neither/nor", "unlikely" or "extremely unlikely" - the resulting score will be the same.
- If you answer "likely" it is more negative than if you answer "don't know" but answering "neither/nor" is even more negative.