Friends and Family Test Tool
Purpose
This resource will:
Make it easy to adopt a digital Friends & Family Test (FFT).
Make it easy to collate a much larger number of returns and find themes from responses.
Make it easy to quickly collate and submit totals on the CQRS portal.
Provide a template in your NHS Microsoft Office environment for practices to answer the key questions needed for CQRS.
Help you collate responses from patients via text message after an appointment or on paper.
Submit monthly returns on CQRS.
What does it actually do?
The resource gets practices started with a digital FFT campaign, by not needing to build the essential building blocks from scratch. Adopt our prebuilt FFT template and start sharing it with your patients on your chosen platforms, including:
Post appointment SMSs,
Paper printouts,
QR codes on posters and waiting room screens,
embedded in your practice website.
We have designed the tool to specifically support staff who may be unfamiliar with or intimidated by Excel's more complex functions such as
navigation,
importing data sources and
managing Power Queries
The Excel interface is deliberately simplified and stripped back to easy interactive buttons. All steps are supported by dialogue boxes explaining what to do next.
What does it look like?
The tool is split into 2 parts.
1) The Microsoft FFT Form
Getting started with the FFT Form
An online form within your nhs.net login. The Friends & Family Test itself looks like this for your patient:
To get started with the template, press the Duplicate it button at the top of our Microsoft Office Template Page.
Do this ONCE ONLY for your practice, (since each person who does it generates a new version within their own NHS.net Microsoft account login, but you'll only need one per site).
We therefore recommend that a practice manager or lead GP does this.
They will then find their practice's adopted Microsoft Form in their own NHS login.
Once you or have adopted (Duplicated) the template, the sections at the top can be personalised to your practice name and message. The questions themselves must be kept as they are, for the tool to work properly later on.
Using Microsoft's own features, you can then share your practice form with other members of your team. This allows them to also see the form and any results, in their Shared with me tab of Microsoft Forms. You may want to do this if a member of your admin team is going to be processing the results for your practice.
Sharing the FFT Form with your patients
The Microsoft online environment lets you collect responses from your form template by clicking on the button:
Here you can create a unique link that can be added to AccuRx messages, websites and even turned into QR codes for the waiting room. You can decide if anyone can respond or specific people. For a FFT we'd advise leaving it to Anyone can respond, with settings as shown below.
Shortening the URL is a good idea when sending to patients as a text message over AccuRx or similar.
Planning on using AccuRx after each appointment?
See the AccuRx support pages for support on appointment reminders and "How to use Post-Appointment Messages (e.g. Friends & Family)"
Analysing Results from the FFT Form
Head over to your Microsoft Forms Login
Click on your FFT Form. This may be in Shared with me
In the top left corner, click on Responses
Here you will find useful tools Microsoft to help you analyse all the responses, regardless of which month they came in. Tools like a "Wordle" diagram, showing the most common words used in responses, can be helpful.
Click on Open in Excel ... (just below the "Wordle") to download an excel file containing all your practice results to your computer.
DO NOT OPEN THIS FILE – It is this file that our tool will use to analyse your CQRS results. Save in a location that you can find when using the Excel Friends and Family test Tool (by default this will be your downloads folder)
2) The Excel Friends and Family Test Tool
This is our Excel file, loaded with programming to make processing the results from the Microsoft Form easier to handle. It won't work on a Mac or if opened within Teams or an online Microsoft environment. It is best downloaded to a Windows computer and run from there. It relies on some more recent Excel features and so the most up to date version of Excel is advised.
Security Warnings
When you first try to open this file on a new computer, you will be presented with up to 2 alerts, depending on your ICB's security protocols.
The first warning is managed before opening the file by right clicking on it and choosing Properties, then Unblock in the General tab.
The second warning is a yellow bar at the top of Excel, when you open the file, asking you to Enable Content. Clicking this lets the code in the file perform as intended.
We have built the excel tool from scratch without any malicious code. The limited number of hyperlinks to websites have been thoroughly checked, connecting only to the Primary Care IT site and nhs.net logins. The file uses VBA programming to make functions easy to access. VBA has the ability to carry malicious code but Primary Care IT have developed this tool specifically to manage just those functions of Excel that users traditionally don't access.
Warning 1
Warning 2
Navigating the Tool
Once opened the file looks like this, with an introductory index page to help you navigate. All features can be found here, including instructions for importing the results of the file.
Tabs at the bottom of the page show you pages that may be useful, just as in an Excel file. Button 3 - import your results should be used to import the file that you saved earlier to your downloads folder
Manually add any paper returns on the page called 📜Paper Returns
The << CQRS Return Tool >> tab at the bottom of the spreadsheet will now show your overall results, ready for adding to CQRS.
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