Access for public and patient comments

Accepted.
Feedback from patients, carers and the public can be made on the quality of care through a range of technologies and channels including online, via bedside televisions, surveys and the friends and family test.
The NHS Constitution (26 March 2013) pledges that the NHS will encourage and welcome feedback on your health and care experiences and use this to improve services. Similarly, The Mandate for NHS England (Department of Health, November 2013) states that NHS England will consider how to make it easier for patients and carers to give feedback and see reviews by other people so that timely, easy to review feedback on NHS Services becomes the norm.
A number of organisations already exist that enable patients, carers and the public to provide online feedback about their care. This includes, but is not limited to, Patient Opinion, NHS Choices, Good Care Guide and iWantGreatCare. NHS England will make such comments accessible in a coherent and consistent way through NHS Choices.

Article 4 of the NHS Constitution states that the NHS will actively encourage feedback from the public, patients and staff, welcome it and use it to improve its services. Organisations should regularly promote their wish to hear from service users and show how they use learning from all feedback (including complaints) to improve services.

After being launched in April 2013, the Friends and Family Test (FFT) was rolled out in phases to most NHS-funded services in England over a two-year period, and now gives all patients, users of services, their carers and loved ones the opportunity to leave feedback on their care and treatment, alongside other means of feeding back as set out on the NHS website. The NHS Standard Contract requires providers to publish complaints monitoring reports (schedule 6).

Note that as a continuous feedback tool, the FFT is not intended to provide data that can be used to compare different organisations. This is to encourage a focus on good quality feedback and opportunities to identify good practice.

Ensuring that patients, carers and the public can give feedback on the quality of care is an on-going commitment. The 2014-15 NHS Mandate sets out how there will be rapid progress in measuring and understanding how people really feel about the care they receive and taking action to address poor performance.

In July 2014 NHS England published a Review of the Friends and Family Test which found that Friends and Family Test is performing well as a service improvement tool, with 85% of trusts reporting that it is being used to improve patient experience, and 78% saying that Friends and Family Test has increased the emphasis placed on patient experience in their trusts. In particular, the open-ended follow-up question is proving a rich source of patient views at ward and Accident and Emergency departmental level that can be used, where implemented, to highlight best practice and identify and address concerns. NHS England is working with NHS Choices to look at ways to enhance the presentation and profile of the Friends and Family Test data for patients and the public to use.

A number of organisations already enable patients, carers and the public to provide online feedback about their care. NHS England will make such comments accessible through a new national Health & Social Care Digital Service, which will be replacing NHS Choices. The new online service will bring together the most reliable and relevant data from national web services and act as a ‘front door’ to the best information on health and social care on the internet.

Results from the Friends and Family Test are published monthly in all acute inpatient services, Accident and Emergency and in maternity.

The first set of Friends and Family Test results from NHS staff were published in September. The Friends and Family Test was rolled out in general practice, community and mental health services by December 2014 and is on track to be rolled out in the remainder of NHS services as appropriate by March 2015. So far more than 5 million Patient Friends and Family Test responses have been collected; 4.5 million responses have been collected from Accident and Emergency and inpatients, and more than 551,000 from maternity patients. The second Staff Friends and Family Test was run from July to September 2014 and more than 141,000 staff from 242 service providers submitted Staff Friends and Family Test responses.

This recommendation was accepted by the Government.

In the January 2014 Hard Truths report, the Government said that the mandate for NHS England for April 2013 to March 2015 stated that NHS England would consider how to make it easier for patients and carers to give feedback and see reviews by other people. Unclear to the extent this consistency was implemented.

In the February 2015 Culture Change report, the Government referred to the roll out of Friends and Family test, asking patients in acute inpatients and A&E if they would recommend the care they have received to their friends and families, with the results published monthly in all acute inpatient services, A&E and in maternity.