Getting started with the Friends & Family Test

Getting started with the Friends & Family Test

The FFT area runs your Friends & Family Test end to end: upload the patients you've seen, send invitations by email or SMS, and review the results and free-text comments — with responses collected anonymously.

The FFT hub

FFT in the header opens the hub, listing your configured FFT site(s) and the three working areas:

  • Cohort upload — build the send list
  • Results dashboard — scores and trends
  • Free-text triage — work through patient comments

Access is per staff member — if you see an "FFT access not enabled for you" message, ask your admin to add you.

Before your first send

A practice administrator must accept two documents — the patient privacy-notice paragraph and our data-processing terms — before invitations can go out. Sending is blocked until they do, and the FFT hub shows an amber banner listing what's outstanding. See Before your first FFT send.

Sending invitations

  1. Open Cohort upload and upload a CSV of patients seen — NHS number, date seen, and an email address and/or mobile number. Common header variations are recognised automatically, and you get a preview before anything is committed; the server validates and de-duplicates on upload.
  2. Use the send panel to dispatch invitations for the site. You can send yourself a test email first, and the panel shows how many invitations are pending.

Each patient gets a unique, single-use link to the anonymous response page — see How patients respond. Patient channel preferences and opt-outs are respected automatically — see Channel preferences.

Reviewing results

  • The Results dashboard shows the headline % would recommend (calculated the NHS England way), response volumes, the score distribution, the trend by month, per-site breakdowns and recent comments.
  • Free-text triage lists comments newest-first for staff review. Record a decision on each — Acknowledged, Action needed, Actioned or Dismissed — with an optional internal note (don't include patient identifiers; responses are anonymous and must stay that way). An untriaged count keeps the backlog visible.

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