"Text Charges"

Dear Unhappy69,

I am sorry that you had had cause to complain about receiving a communication from our Trust regarding the Friends and Family Test survey and would like to thank you for raising this with us.

The NHS England’s Friends and Family Test (FFT) is mandated as part of the NHS contract for use throughout all areas of the NHS. This includes hospitals, GP surgeries, dentists etc. Along with all other general hospitals across the country, United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust has to ask inpatients, emergency patients, women who use maternity services, outpatients and day case patients how likely they are to recommend the ward, Accident and Emergency Department, outpatient clinic or department to their friends and family based on their experience in the hospital—this question has a range of possible answers from 'Extremely likely' to 'Extremely unlikely'.

We ask the FFT question to all of our patients within 48 hours of using one of our services and as you can imagine this is a huge task with us seeing so many people which is why we had to move to an electronic automated system to collect this data.

With regards to the notification of a charge, patients who text 80870 will not be charged anything. Our system uses a free to end user short code. This warning is a message that may appear for some smartphone users who run Android operating system 4.2 and above. It is a generic message that comes up for all short codes and doesn’t differentiate between those that charge or those that are free. But please be assured your FFT responses are FREE.

If you would like me to opt you out of the receipt of any future FFT survey texts then please contact my assistant, Christopher.sharman@ulh.nhs.uk quoting reference CO388532 and we will opt you out immediately.

With best regards,

Sharon Kidd,

Patient Experience Manager