Patients seen at Bradford Royal Infirmary’s accident and emergency department are being handed tokens to make their experience count.

The purple coin-like tokens have to be posted in to one of six slot boxes depending on the answer the patient wants to give to the following question: How likely are you to recommend our A&E Department to your friends and family if they need similar treatment?

The possible ratings range from ‘don’t know’ to ‘extremely unlikely’ and to ‘extremely likely’, says Isla Dowds whose job at Bradford Teaching Hospitals Trust is to make sure patients have a say and their feedback is acted on.

The token system introduced two weeks ago is part of a bigger Family and Friends test which covers all of England’s NHS acute hospital in-patient and A&E departments.

Postcards are also being given to patients on its wards posing the same question and have to be returned within 48 hours of discharge. Feedback can be made on smartphones too and there will also be a text option.

Patients over 16 who stay the night in hospital or are seen at A&E are encouraged to take part in the scheme as well as everyone in the maternity unit.

Since it started the Family and Friends Test in April, championed by David Cameron, more than 7,000 people have had their say at BRI, with 94 per cent of them likely or extremely likely to recommend their experience at the hands of the hospital trust and 71 per cent of them saying it would be extremely likely they would make a recommendation.

“We wanted to come up with a way of making it even easier for people to respond and we discovered other hospitals already using the token system were getting good response scores and also from wider ages. The thing about feedback is that you need enough people doing it to make sure you get a true picture,” said Mrs Dowds.

Staff on the wards and in A&E are updated on a Monday on how they are doing. Comments from follow-up postcards also go up on the walls – including any negative comments and what is being done about it.

All the responses are sent off regularly to be analysed by a major patient feedback organisation before being forwarded to the Department of Health.

The results are then published once a month and go up on websites to include NHS Choices.