The Only National Awards For Non-Medical / Non-Clinical NHS Staff & Volunteers

Nomination

Award Category:

Estates & Ancillary

Individual or Team Nomination?

Individual

Nominators Answer

Nominee's story :

Porters likely do more steps per day around a hospital site than any other profession serving the NHS. Porters ensure the swift movement of patients, meals, equipment, samples, anything that needs to get from one place to another to ensure safe and efficient care. Traditional methods of allocating tasks to porters involve systems like bleeps and radios, creating issues with confidentiality, inefficiency, and disruption to patient care. At Lancashire Teaching Hospitals, Clinical and Clinical Support Leaders made a determined case for change to their Executive Board in 2021, requesting the end of bleeps and by June 2022 they had rolled out Alcidion Smartpage. Averaging 25,000 portering requests per month, the deputy head of portering Martin Keeney was resolute that optimizing task allocation and logistics could serve to further increase the efficiency of this key team and realise a better experience for patients. Working side by side with the Quality Improvement team, and Digital Project Managers, Martin became central to the delivery of the incoming task allocation software. Martin and portering management collected data from the outset and used the PLAN, DO, STUDY, ACT (PDSA) model whilst trialling diverse ways of working within the Emergency Department. Overcoming many a challenge, Martin focused on the positives and led the way in supporting porters and wider support services to make the changes - step by step – regularly feeding back the improvements seen in patient care, patient flow and for porters. The insights showed that there were times of high levels of activity and under-utilisation periods, leading to LTH removing the dedicated porters from ED and including them in the general pool. This made a 50% saving on response times to patients needing transferring from the ED department from 12 minutes to 6 minutes on average. This also created a steadier stream of patients being transferred rather than being ‘batched’ and all happening at the same time. This one change significantly supported patient flow from the front door. And by October 2023, porters at LTH were achieving an 85.4% completion rate within the 15-minute response KPI. Martin helped the porters recognise and appreciate all the positive impacts for them including an ability to self-despatch and manage their own workloads, empowering the team and ensuring they can adapt their tasks when necessary. Porters could also now easily access emails and keep up to date and connected with Trust messages, whilst providing a quick and effective way of contacting and involving all team members on duty with any urgent messages of the day. Now more familiar with new technology, confidence in accessing smart devices has supported these staff to use devices for a wider range of applications. LTH aim to expand the implementation of this technology to other departments like domestics, meeting compliance requirements such as CQC (Care Quality Commission) reporting on infection rates and enhancing processes using technology previously managed manually. We have no doubt that Martin will continue to be a strong supportive advocate for change, sharing his and the teams experiences of how supported rollout of new technology can really change and save lives. Although the Trust and wider partners make sure we tell Martin how much he is appreciates, it would be fantastic for him to get further recognition through these awards as the Unsung Hero he truly is…