If your current FFT provider is leaving the market, your immediate priority will be making sure that the collection of insightful patient feedback continues without interruption.
This also provides a great opportunity to step back and consider what you need from your FFT programme over the next few years and beyond. Many organisations using the Friends and Family Test (FFT) have a continuous picture of how patients experience care. It helps them understand what is working well, where people encounter problems or dissatisfaction and where services and the delivery of care can improve.
Picker has worked alongside NHS organisations since the FFT was introduced in 2013. As an approved supplier on the NHS Business Services Authority FFT Framework, we've helped organisations gather, interpret and use patient feedback to better understand people's experiences of care and inform improvements that place patients at the centre of decision-making. That reflects our wider ambition: the highest quality person centred care for all, always.
This guide explores the questions worth asking as you choose your next patient FFT provider and the qualities that will help your programme deliver lasting value.
Understanding the Friends and Family Test
The NHS Friends and Family Test gives patients a simple, anonymous way to share their experience of care. Patients answer one or two core questions about their overall experience of the service they received, selecting a response from "very good" to "very poor". They can also explain their score through free text comments. This is very much a minimum standard – at Picker, our service is built around going above and beyond a single question to provide the best possible insight to drive improvement.
Feedback can be collected through SMS, QR codes, kiosks, tablets, online questionnaires and paper forms, giving organisations flexibility to reach different patient groups.
Since its introduction in 2013, the FFT has become one of the largest continuous sources of patient feedback in the world. It is a mandatory requirement across acute, community, mental health, ambulance, primary medical and dental services, as well as independent providers delivering NHS-funded care.
Every response is an opportunity to understand care through the eyes of the person receiving it, helping services become more responsive, more inclusive and more person centred.
Making sense of patient feedback
Every month, NHS organisations hear from thousands of patients through the FFT programme, with each response representing someone's experience of care. Observed together, these responses can provide a rich source of insight, although understanding what data to collect, how to interpret that data and where to focus first can be challenging.
Many organisations are looking for practical ways to:
- Identify actionable improvement priorities
- Make sense of free text comments at scale
- Distinguish meaningful quality signals from background noise
- Collect feedback in accessible and inclusive ways, with sufficient demographic visibility
- Connect patient FFT with governance, safety, quality and wider patient experience measures
- Give boards robust assurance about patients' experiences of care
These are conversations that Picker has been having with NHS organisations for more than a decade. We firmly believe that organisations gain the greatest value from FFT programmes when they have data and reporting that is easy to interpret, thoughtful analysis of patient comments and clear links between feedback and service improvement.
Selecting your next patient FFT provider
A change of provider gives NHS organisations an opportunity to think carefully about what they need from their FFT programme.
Planning for a smooth transition
Continuity is essential. Organisations should feel confident that patient feedback can continue without interruption, that reporting will remain consistent and implementation will be well supported. It is worth asking how historic data will be managed, how quickly the new service can be introduced and what support is available both during the transition and afterwards.
Tailoring your programme to local priorities
While the FFT is a national requirement, patient experience of care should not be approached as a tick box exercise. Organisations should look for a provider that can help them make the most of the feedback they collect, using the FFT alongside other patient experience activity to understand what matters most to their patients and staff. This could mean tailoring questions to local priorities, identifying emerging themes or particular areas of concern, and connecting patient feedback with wider quality improvement activities.
The overarching aim should be to create a holistic patient experience programme that happens to include the FFT, rather than collecting data simply to meet a reporting requirement.
Reaching patients in different ways
Patients should be able to respond in ways that suit them. A strong FFT programme supports multiple data collection methods, while helping organisations gather feedback from a broad and relevant pool of people who have experienced care.
Reporting that helps teams to act
Good reporting helps staff understand what patients are experiencing, how themes are developing over time and where attention is needed. The most useful reports help teams make decisions and enable them to share learning and insights across services and departments.
Learning from patient comments
Free text responses often contain the richest insight into people's experiences. Organisations should consider how qualitative feedback is analysed and interpreted, how themes are identified and how learning can be shared with clinical and operational teams.
Choosing an experience provider
Running an effective FFT programme calls for an understanding of patient experience, NHS quality improvement and organisational governance. A provider with experience across these areas can help organisations build confidence in both their data and the decisions that follow.
No “one size fits all”
No two organisations use the Friends and Family Test in quite the same way. Some are looking for a dependable service that delivers reliable collection and reporting, whilst others want the FFT to contribute to wider patient experience programmes, local insight and improvement work.
Picker delivers the patient FFT programme as a flexible, structured programme that reflects those different requirements. As an approved supplier on the NHS Business Services Authority FFT Framework, Picker has supported NHS organisations since the Friends and Family Test was introduced.
Our support can be tailored to your organisation. We can provide advice during implementation, build your FFT programme with you or manage the entire service on your behalf.
The future of the FFT
In December 2025, Picker published a roadmap for reforming the Friends and Family Test, setting out recommendations for the Department of Health and Social Care, NHS England and local providers.
The report argues that patient feedback can play a stronger role in improving person centred care when organisations have better information about who is responding, stronger ways to analyse qualitative comments and clearer routes for using insight in decision-making.
Our recommendations include creating a holistic patient experience programme tailored to local priorities, supporting analysis of qualitative feedback at scale, strengthening board oversight and transparency and encouraging organisations to share examples of - and routes to - improvement.
The Friends and Family Test already captures millions of people’s experiences each year. The opportunity now is to make more efficient and well-rounded use of those experiences and ensure they continue to inform and guide better care.
Talk to Picker
Whether you are looking for a reliable patient FFT programme or exploring how the FFT can contribute more to local insight and improvement, we would welcome a conversation.
Picker would be happy to discuss your current approach, the level of support that would suit your organisation, and demonstrate the service model and reporting options that best meet your needs.
