The new Friends and Family Test is due to start in all hospitals from April this year.
The test involves all hospital patients being asked whether they would recommend the place that they were treated in and has already been tried out at Leicester’s hospitals since April 2012.
Prime Minister, David Cameron, has said that the Friends and Family Test initiative was part of a drive to improve care standards in 2013. The initiative would also be focusing on dementia, extra training for staff and more nursing rounds. An extra £13 million will be spent on training health care assistants and a £50 million fund will be used to train all NHS and social care staff in care for dementia patients.
The Prime Minister has said that there is still a “long way to go” to raise the standards of care in the NHS in England.
Mr Cameron was reported as saying:
“Of course this is a complicated issue and there’s no one single answer. We have an excellent NHS, with very high standards of nursing care in most of our hospitals, but recent examples – Stafford, Redditch, others – have shown that we have got a problem in some places.”
His intervention comes after the Care Quality Commission and the Patients Association published reports last year raising significant concerns about the quality of care.
The Care Quality Commission warned that its inspections were showing that services were struggling in areas such as dignity and respect, nutrition care and welfare whilst the Patients Association published a dossier of 13 “appalling” cases of care given to NHS patients.
Peter Carter of the Royal College of Nursing welcomed the new Friends and Family Test initiative but also said it was important to keep supporting nurses, through training and resources, so they could keep doing their jobs to the best of their ability.
In the pilot tests last year, Leicester’s hospitals scored 51 out of 100 when the results were first published in May. The results for November showed that this had risen to 57 out of 100.
Katherine Murphy of the Patients Association agreed that there was much to do to improve care in the NHS, but she felt that the Friends and Family Test was too simplified to drive improvements.
Comment
The new initiative of the Friends and Family Test could prove to be a positive step in the right direction to improving care because it should help to quickly and effectively alert hospitals to areas that need improvement. However, those improvements can only be made if the test results are actively followed-up and it remains to be seen whether hospitals have the time and resources to do so.
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