Friends and family test
Mr David Cameron introduced ‘the Friends and Family Test’ (FFT) at the beginning of this year. However, the FFT is based on a model developed to test satisfaction with consumer products. Prof Clare Gerada, Chair of the Council of the Royal College of GPs, rightly questioned whether friends and family are proper judges of the NHS in all its complexity:
“The NHS isn’t Facebook, and healthcare isn’t a commodity like eating in a restaurant. And we must make sure that we don’t confuse issues around the NHS such as shortages, with the care that patients get from the staff that look after them.”
Dr Kailash Chand from the BMA Council likewise posited,
“Who can disagree with that?”.
Prof Peter Lynn, an expert on survey methodology from Essex University, says the findings may be unreliable.
“I have concerns about whether the friends and family test will actually provide data that allows meaningful comparisons of the performance of trusts – partly because of reliance on a single rather vague question and partly because hospitals will vary in how they approach patients and encourage them to answer the question.”
The government insists the test will give everyone a clear idea of where to get the best care, without piling costs on trusts. It says by checking on the NHS choices website, people will be able to see which trusts are in the normal range, those among the best and those among the worst.
Meanwhile, in a different sector, owners of pubs, restaurants, hotels and bars are all too familiar with “TripAdvisor”, which is loved and loathed in equal measures.TripAdvisor, which claims to have 75 million online reviews, allows people to post anonymously and without even proving they have been to the place in question. Getting a high or low rating can make or break a business. Chris Emmins of KwikChex, which investigates online reviews, believes there are as many as ten million fake reviews on the site by ‘trolls’ – someone who posts a deliberately provocative message with the intention of causing maximum disruption – who are either disgruntled former employees or rival businesses.
Emmins said:
“It’s war out there. Getting a top rating is crucial and yet one bad one-star review can hit the ratings so hard that it takes 20 five-star reviews to get the rating back.”
This is a wider example of the phenomenon called “shilling” in marketing. A shill, also called a plant or a stooge, is a person who publicly helps a person or organisation without disclosing that he has a close relationship with that person or organisation. “Shill” typically refers to someone who purposely gives onlookers the impression that he is an enthusiastic independent customer of a seller (or marketer of ideas) for whom he is secretly working. The person or group who hires the shill is using crowd psychology, to encourage other onlookers or audience members to purchase the goods or services (or accept the ideas being marketed). Shills are often employed by professional marketing campaigns, and there is a danger that, like the original FFT has been imported, the practice of “shilling” could be imported too. Shilling is illegal in many circumstances and in many jurisdictions, because of the potential for fraud and damage, however, if a shill does not place uninformed parties at a risk of loss, but merely generates “buzz,” the shill’s actions may be legal. For example, a person planted in an audience to laugh and applaud when desired, or to participate in on-stage activities as a “random member of the audience,” is a type of legal shill.
Yep, if you’re familiar with corporate marketing, we’ve been here before!
