Hospital Porters

17th January 2012

On the whole the hospital porter system just does not work, at least at all the NHS hospitals I have worked.

Porters are used to transport patients, equipment, samples etc. throughout the hospital. This can be quite a feat in the larger older hospitals which tend to be a bunch of disparate buildings cobbled together through a labyrinth of corridors.

The only time the system seems to work correctly is when porters are assigned to specific functions. For example, a team of porters are usually assigned to medical imaging. Their job being to cart patients to and from the x-ray, CT &s; MRI scanners. Specific porters are often allocated to attend cardiac arrest calls. This can literally be a life saver.

The porter system does not work for anything else and definitely doesn't work out of hours or near the end of the day (9am - 5pm, Monday to Friday). Blood samples are never collected on time. Today blood samples were ported to the lab at 3pm after being taken at 9am this morning. Last week one of the patients needed an urgent CT at 4:30pm, and in the end it required one doctor and a nurse to leave the ward and cart the patient down to imaging. This is a regular occurrence. I have had patients waiting in corridors for hours after procedures because the porter is very late.

There is a vicious cycle especially transporting patients. Nurses know the porters aren't going to come on time so they don't prepare the patient for transport. When the porter does arrive, the nurses then start preparing the patient (removing drips, disconnecting oxygen etc) making the porter wait for several minutes.

How can this be improved?

  1. Let the porters focus on transporting patients, not the routine jobs like transporting blood samples or equipment. Either use a pod system or some other more flexible automated transport system.
  2. Just like taxi services, use a central command to know where the porters are so they can be dispatched from job to job without having to head back to HQ after each job. This sometimes happens with porters carrying walkie talkies.
  3. Allow clinical staff to know when the porter will arrive i.e. where are they in the queue of jobs the porter has to do.

All these systems will be expensive to implement on a one off basis for each trust so probably will not be coming to the NHS any time soon.