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Friends and Family Test: Disappointing news for London practices

Although it is a contractual requirement for practices to carry out the Friends and Family Test (F&FT) and submit data each month, the May return for London was a disappointing 57% (a drop of 13% on April). This is a significant and worrying drop on the figures for February when the F&FT was launched in London. In comparison percentages for the other regions were:

North: 72%
Midland and East: 70%
South: 68%

We must remind practices that if you do not submit F&FT data monthly for 3 consecutive months you will be in breach of your contracts and risk having a breach notice issued to you.

We are aware that there must be confusion for practices about the data required for F&FT because NHS E has the monthly returns that show that many practices have not submitted regularly and some, not since it was introduced.

Please note the F&FT is not a one–off exercise but is an ongoing commitment that is written into your practice contract. Monthly submissions of the data you collect from F&FT must be submitted on the 12th working day in the month after the data is collected. July’s data is due on the 18th August.

There are a variety of reasons you may not have submitted the required data:

• Practices only have one person entering data into CQRS (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 (GP data submission system) did not work as intended, i.e. 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 E are now identifying them and removing them);
• Some practices have a restricted patient list thus feel F&FT 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 necessary;
• There may also be practices deliberately not submitting.

Londonwide advice:

• Have a reliable, fool proof process in place that ensures the data for F&FT 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 attached guidance).
• 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 monthly.
• Do not collect F&FT returns for months and submit 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 non-submitter.
• All practices, whatever their patient list must submit collect and F&FT data.
• If you do not submit data for 3 months NHS E can issue you with a breach notice.
• Aim to submit at least 10 responses a month.

LLMC issued guidance on the F&FT test in November 2014.

Last updated : 11 Sep 2015

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