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Friends and Family Test - act now to avoid a breach notice

We are aware that there may be some confusion about the data required for the Friends and Family Test (FFT).

NHS England data on the monthly returns show that many practices have not submitted information regularly, and some, not since it was introduced.

It is a contractual requirement for practices to carry out the FFT and submit data each month. A minimum of five responses is required by NHS England.

Please remember that if you do not submit FFT data monthly for three consecutive months you will be in breach of your contract and risk having a breach notice issued to you.

Please note the FFT is not a one-off exercise. It is an ongoing commitment that is written into your practice contract. Monthly submissions of the data you collect from FFT must be submitted on the 12th working day in the month after the data is collected.

The data for AUGUST 2015 data is due on Wednesday 16 September 2015.

If you are one of the practices that has NOT submitted data, you are advised to address this and examine the reasons why. Practices may not have submitted the required data because:

• Practices only have one person entering data into CQRS (Calculating Quality Reporting Services) (and no one has been doing it while this person is on holiday or off sick).
• Practices thought this was only a short term exercise, so entered for a period then stopped.
• CQRS did not work as intended, ie, instead of showing January 2015 first it brought up January 2016.
• Some practices are part of community services and should not have been on the submitters list (NHS England are now identifying them and removing them).
• Some practices have a restricted patient list thus feel FFT is not relevant to them.
• Data has been submitted after the submission date and therefore does not count.
• Data was collected over several months and submitted all at once.
• No data was collected so a submission was not felt to be necessary.
• There may also be practices deliberately not submitting information.

Londonwide LMCs' advice:

• Have a reliable, fool proof process in place that ensures the data for FFT is uploaded monthly and most critically does not rely on one person.
• Educate the members of staff responsible for the monthly upload on how to do this via CQRS (see our August 2015 newsletter for further information).
• Be aware the data needs to be submitted monthly on the 12th working day after the month in question.
• Even if you have no responses a submission still needs to be uploaded on a monthly basis.
• Do not collect FFT returns for months and submit them all at once. The data needs to be spread out and submitted month by month.
• Be aware of the deadlines for data submission. If you miss the deadline, your data will not count and you will be classed as a non-submitter.
• All practices, whatever their patient list, must collect and submit FFT data.
• If you do not submit data for three months NHSE can issue you with a breach notice.
• Aim to submit at least 10 FFT patient/carer responses a month - less than five responses will be classed as "no data" by NHSE.

FFT submission dates for the rest of the year are:

• Friday 16 October for September data
• Tuesday 17 November for October data
• Wednesday 16 December for November data
• Tuesday 19 January 2016 for December 2015 data

For further help and advice please contact Julie Sharman at Londonwide LMCs on Julie.Sharman@lmc.org.uk.

Last updated : 17 Sep 2015

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