Mark Edwards worked as a porter and then as a porter supervisor for nearly three years at Hull Royal Infirmary (part of Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, a large Acute Trust and one of the UK’s 27 Major Trauma Centres), working his way up to become porter manager where he spent an additional five years in the role.
He was a member of the team at Hull which worked collaboratively with the team at GlobalView Systems, as part of more than 100 trusts across the country who helped with feedback in the development of MyPorter, Global View’s porter task management software solution, which saw its first install within the hospital Mark worked in.
Fast-forward nine months and Mark has now taken the leap to leave behind the NHS for a role at GlobalView in a move which he sees as a case of “leaving the NHS to help the NHS”.
Mark is leaving behind his beloved portering team within the NHS as he sees the opportunity at GlobalView as a route to be able to help the NHS in a bigger way, having seen first-hand how much benefit the MyPorter system can bring to a trust, and he wants to use his knowledge and experiences with it to bring it to the attention of more hospitals across the country who he truly believes will see the benefits and reap the rewards from it, and overall help improve the NHS, the portering service as a whole and more importantly, patient care and experience.
He explained: “It might seem odd to say that I feel I needed to leave the NHS to help the NHS, but effectively that is what I am doing.
“I want to teach other hospitals about how much of an impact the MyPorter system had at Hull and what it can do for their portering teams – it really did revolutionise the portering team there and brought the service into the 21st century.
“Before MyPorter, in certain areas of the hospital, jobs were written as magnetic notes and stuck to a board with no visibility of porter’s, number of tasks or records to show peaks in demand.”
In the nine months that Mark has been using MyPorter with his portering teams, Hull Royal Infirmary has expanded its acute bed space with the opening of an extension, seeing the addition of about 40-50 new beds. Before, they may have had to take on extra portering staff to ensure these new beds were catered for.
Using MyPorter allowed them to plan better, which coupled with the improved efficiency they saw from using it, meant they were able to cope with the staff already available to them.
Mark added: “One of the things I like to say to people from other portering teams who visited us at Hull (to see what it is like to use MyPorter in a real life setting) is that increased capacity doesn’t always mean there is a need for increased staff, and that’s all thanks to the way MyPorter works – the data and insights it provided us with, enabled us to make the right decisions at the right time”.
Mark knows from experience that doing a difficult job in difficult circumstances isn’t easy, and although the NHS are battling hard to maintain their successes, from the knowledge Mark has gained in his role as a porter manager, he knows GlobalView have created a tool that can help the NHS battle this pandemic, the aftermath and continue to support them well into the future.
“What I liked about GlobalView as a porter manager is that it was obvious from the beginning that they want to help you and look to do this by building a long-term partnership with you to ensure your hospital’s portering teams are running as effectively as possible.”
In addition to Hull and Sunderland Royal Hospital (who have recently agreed to roll the system out across their entire site, after initially starting solely within the Radiology Department), other hospitals such as Barnsley, Leighton and Walsall have also being reaping the benefits of such a partnership and now the MyPorter family has grown rapidly with the additions of eight further hospitals who are live or due to go live over the next couple of months. Mark is now on this side of the fence, and he is looking forward to building on this further, as well as being able to tell those who are yet to find out about MyPorter all about his belief in its ability and what it can do for their Trust.
To chat to Mark or another member of the MyPorter team at Global View, please email: [email protected] / [email protected] or call on (0)1482 772536
