Friends & Family Test
The Friends and Family Test (FFT) is an important feedback tool that supports the fundamental principle that people who use NHS services should have the opportunity to provide feedback on their experience. Listening to the views of patients and staff helps identify what is working well, what can be improved and how.
We collect your friends and family responses via AskMyGP. You can also submit your responses by using the QR code opposite. This is also displayed in the practice waiting room.
In June 2024, we received 59 responses. 86% said that the service received had been good or very good.
Thank you to all of our patients for taking the time to leave feedback for us. We do welcome feedback in order to help us improve our services. As ever, there are many, many well deserved compliments about our staff members. Thank you! They do see these, and they are very well received. Most comments are very constructive. Sadly, there are a small proportion that are not. We do recognise that we don't get things right 100% of the time. However, please be kind when dealing with our staff and mindful when typing your feedback. We always strive to do our best to help you.
Many of you have continued to comment on how impressed you are with the speed of our responses to you and the compassion shown by our staff in all staff groups.
Some patients have felt initial disappointment when being signposted to a community pharmacy for their ailments. However, in the vast majority of cases, the feedback has been very positive about the community pharmacies, once patients have tried out the service. Thank you to those of you who have done so. This means our clinical staff have more time to deal with those patients who specifically need the services of the GP Practice.
Some patients have asked about the AskMyGP service being open outside of opening hours. We can understand why this could be useful. When we first started using AskMyGP five years ago, we used to leave this on all day, every day. We would very often come into a large number of requests that had come in through the night which had resolved by the time we contacted the patient on the next working day. We were finding that this was not a good use of time and was delaying us dealing with more urgent cases. Furthermore, the service isn't monitored through the night. This can be a worry in terms of something quite urgent being missed, instead of a patient accessing an out of hours, dedicated service. We did recognise, however, that we were not leaving the service open for long enough in the day in recent times. We listened to this feedback and re-structured how we were managing the system. Over the past few months, the AskMyGP service is now open and monitored between 8:00am and 5:00pm, Monday to Friday, which seems to be working much better.
Thank you.