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Family and Friends Test (FFT) for UK Healthcare Organisations

Helping the NHS and UK healthcare providers listen, learn, and build patient trust.

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We’re proud to be trusted by 400+ public sector organisations from healthcare and higher education, to local and central government, housing and policing, to emergency services and travel and transport.

The Family and Friends Test (FFT) is one of the most widely used patient experience measures across the UK healthcare system. Introduced by the NHS to improve transparency and accountability, FFT enables patients to provide feedback on the care they receive and helps organisations understand where services are working well, and where improvements are needed.

For healthcare organisations under increasing scrutiny, FFT is not just a reporting requirement. When implemented effectively, it becomes a powerful tool for building trust, improving services, and strengthening relationships with patients and communities.

Orlo helps healthcare organisations deliver FFT in a way that is meaningful, compliant, and connected to wider patient engagement and digital communication.

How Orlo supports Family and Friends Test delivery

Orlo enables healthcare organisations to manage FFT as part of a joined-up digital engagement strategy, rather than a standalone survey.

Voice of the Community provides meaningful FFT feedback

Orlo’s Voice of the Community tools allow organisations to:

  • Deliver FFT surveys digitally
  • Collect structured responses and free-text feedback
  • Analyse sentiment and themes at scale
  • Track trends over time across services and locations

This makes FFT insight accessible, actionable, and relevant to decision-makers and frontline teams.

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Connecting FFT with Real-Time Patient Conversations

FFT results do not exist in isolation. Patients share experiences across social media, online reviews, as well as direct messages and enquiries.

Orlo brings all of these conversations together, enabling teams to:

  • Understand how FFT results align with wider patient sentiment
  • Identify emerging issues early
  • Respond consistently and appropriately

This holistic view supports safer, more informed patient and community engagement.

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Acting on feedback to build trust

Trust is built when patients see action, not just surveys.

With Orlo, healthcare organisations can:

  • Identify priority issues from FFT feedback
  • Share updates and improvements with patients
  • Demonstrate transparency through consistent communication
  • Evidence impact for leadership, regulators, and stakeholders

This helps turn FFT from a compliance requirement into a trust-building mechanism.

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You can explore how these capabilities fit together to deliver more powerful family and friends tests in our healthcare community engagement solution.

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Why use Orlo for Family and Friends Test delivery?

Orlo is built specifically for public sector and healthcare organisations, with a focus on:

1

Orlo is built for the public sector and healthcare organisations.

Healthcare organisations choose Orlo because it is designed specifically for their context. Rather than adapting commercial marketing tools, teams use Orlo because it's built around governance, safeguarding, and trust.
2

Manage social media and community sentiment side by side.

Spot trends with AI-powered insights, capture the voice of your community through surveys, use our Trust Indicator to show where confidence is growing - or where it’s at risk and track performance and prove the impact of your work.
3

Save valuable time.

By centralising your communication, you save time, improve service delivery, and strengthen the connection between your organisation and the people you serve.
4

One platform to manage engagement.

Unlike generic survey tools, Orlo supports the full lifecycle of patient engagement, from listening, to learning, to action.

Everything your team needs to engage, listen and respond

Insights reporting

AI-powered listening and reporting to turn insight into action.

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Surveys

Capture direct, indirect and inferred feedback. So you can listen to all of your community.

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Unified Inbox

See all of your digital conversations together in one simple inbox.

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Automation

Efficiently managing your inbound digital and social messages with automation.

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Benchmarking

Understand what’s happening within your sector and how you compare at a glance.

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Social Listening

Listen to and understand the needs of your community with social media listening.

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Analytics

Interpret your data and create impactful reports that show the value of your work.

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Content Calendar

Plan, create, approve, schedule and manage all of your campaigns in one place.

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Content Creation

Use our content creation tools to publish engaging, relevant and timely content.

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Auditing

View the end-to-end history of all your social activities with auditing.

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Reviews

Monitor, respond to, and amplify your reviews to understand what matters most to your community.

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Generate

Drive time and cost efficiencies, ensuring you still reflect your tone of voice.

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Post Boosting

Ensure your most vital updates get in front of the right people, at the right time, for greater reach, clicks and engagement.

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Chatbot

Increase team capacity, save your agents’ time and decrease cost-to-serve by reducing 50% of inbound queries.

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Live Chat

Be there when your community need you most by responding instantly with Orlo’s live chat feature.

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Orlo Insights

Combine the power of Social Listening, Media Monitoring and AI, developed with the Public Sector in mind.

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Scheduling Tools

Use the content calendar to plan ahead and schedule social media posts at peak times to boost engagement.

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Social Archiving

Archive social media posts with ease, archiving is built in to the Orlo platform as standard.

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Schedule a platform demo

What to expect

A discovery session to understand your strategic objectives
An opportunity to share any circumstances that may be making achieving those outcomes more challenging
A live demo of the Orlo platform, bespoke to you, complete with best practice guidance and case study examples from across the Orlo community
A friendly, no pressured approach from someone who understands the public sector

Schedule a platform demo

What to expect

A discovery session to understand your strategic objectives
An opportunity to share any circumstances that may be making achieving those outcomes more challenging
A live demo of the Orlo platform, bespoke to you, complete with best practice guidance and case study examples from across the Orlo community
A friendly, no pressured approach from someone who understands the public sector

What is the Family and Friends Test?

The Family and Friends Test asks patients a simple but important question:
“How likely are you to recommend this service to friends and family if they needed similar care or treatment?”

Patients can respond using a scale (from “extremely likely” to “extremely unlikely”) and are encouraged to provide additional comments explaining their answer.

FFT is used across:

  • NHS Trusts
  • GP practices
  • Community health services
  • Mental health services
  • Integrated Care Systems (ICSs)

The purpose is to give patients a voice and help healthcare organisations monitor experience, identify trends, and drive improvement.

Why the Family and Friends Test matters in healthcare

Building trust and confidence in healthcare services

Trust sits at the heart of effective healthcare delivery. When patients are invited to share honest feedback and can clearly see how it leads to real improvements, confidence in services grows. The Family and Friends Test gives organisations a consistent and structured way to listen to patient voices and demonstrate that their experiences genuinely matter.

By using FFT not just to collect scores, but to understand the reasons behind them, healthcare organisations can show transparency, accountability and a willingness to learn. Sharing outcomes and changes openly reassures patients that their feedback is taken seriously, helping to strengthen relationships, improve perceptions of care and build long-term trust across communities.

Improving quality of care

FFT feedback gives healthcare organisations a direct window into the patient experience, highlighting what is working well and where care can be improved. By reviewing responses across services and settings, teams can identify recurring issues, understand how patients feel at different points in their journey, and prioritise changes based on real lived experience rather than assumptions.

When FFT insights are combined with wider engagement channels such as surveys, complaints data and digital listening, they support a culture of continuous improvement. Instead of becoming a tick-box exercise, FFT becomes a practical tool for learning, helping organisations make informed decisions, improve service quality and demonstrate to patients that their voices genuinely influence care.

Transparency and accountability

FFT supports NHS principles of openness and accountability. Publishing results and acting on feedback demonstrates commitment to patient-centred care and helps organisations meet regulatory and governance expectations.

Real-world use of FFT in Healthcare

When used effectively, the Family and Friends Test becomes part of an ongoing conversation with patients, not just a reporting requirement.

One NHS Trust, delivering outpatient and community services, used digital FFT surveys alongside face-to-face feedback gathered by frontline staff. Patients were invited to share their experience after appointments, while teams continued to capture informal comments during clinics and ward rounds. Rather than focusing only on scores, the Trust analysed written feedback to understand what patients were really saying.

FFT responses revealed recurring concerns about appointment communications, even though clinical care was rated highly. By reviewing sentiment trends across feedback and wider patient conversations, the Trust identified a clear, organisation-wide issue. They acted quickly, improving messaging and response times, and shared regular “You said, we did” updates so patients could see how their feedback was driving change.

By embedding FFT into a broader engagement and listening approach, the Trust reduced complaints, improved confidence, and strengthened relationships with its communities, turning patient feedback into a visible driver of trust and service improvement.

The risk of treating FFT as a tick-box exercise

While FFT is widely adopted, many organisations struggle to realise its full value.

Common challenges include:

  • Collecting feedback but not analysing it meaningfully
  • Siloed survey data with no connection to wider patient engagement
  • Delayed responses to negative feedback
  • Limited visibility for frontline teams
  • No clear way to show how feedback leads to change

When FFT is handled in isolation, it can undermine trust rather than build it.

This is where Orlo’s approach is different.

Orlo’s community engagement platform is built to enable public sector comms teams achieve 6 key outcomes

Better Health

Using a preventionfocused strategy can enhance health outcomes by reducing disease incidence, lowering costs, and promoting healthier lifestyles, leading to a more resilient and healthier population.

Sustainable Future

Engaging the public in net zero initiatives increases awareness, fosters collective action, improves environmental health, and builds a safer, more sustainable country for current and future generations.

Stronger Economy

Creating an environment for businesses to thrive by enhancing services like education, healthcare and infrastructure boosts opportunities, productivity and attracts investment for the economy.

Supported Families

Engaging young people in our communities fosters healthier development, improves education, and reduces future social issues. This leads to a more skilled workforce and a stronger, more resilient society.

Improved Housing

Improving housing experiences leads to better maintenance, higher satisfaction, and proactive safety measures, resulting in safer homes and ultimately healthier, more secure communities.

Safer Communities

Increasing public engagement fosters trust, collaboration, and awareness, which in turn helps to empower communities to address local challenges proactively, leading to safer and happier .

Get started with FFT using Orlo

If your organisation is looking to deliver the Family and Friends Test in a way that genuinely improves patient experience and builds trust, Orlo can help.

Discover the Orlo solutions for healthcare:

  • Voice of the Community & Surveys
  • Social Listening
  • Social Media Management
  • Secure, compliant engagement tools

See Orlo in action.

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