Hospital porters are employed to move patients between wards and departments and to move goods and vital supplies including medical equipment, linen, blood, and samples. This is generally not regarded as skilled work, it attracts little attention and pay and conditions are generally among the lowest in the hospital. In India similar work is done by ward boys. Their monthly pay in 2020 was around 5,000 rupees ($66: £52) a month.
Traditionally, hospitals often had a dispatcher, a person sat at a central desk, taking calls from across all wards and departments where a porter is needed. Just as porters could be needed at any time of the day or night so was this co-ordination function, making it quite an expensive overhead. This has often been replaced by a system using
pager
A pager (also known as a beeper or bleeper) is a wireless telecommunications device that receives and displays alphanumeric or voice messages. One-way pagers can only receive messages, while response pagers and two-way pagers can also acknow ...
s. A more technically advanced solution, giving visibility of porters and allocating work more efficiently can reduce cost and improve efficiency, prioritising the most urgent tasks and giving more detail of what is required.
The
privatization
Privatization (also privatisation in British English) can mean several different things, most commonly referring to moving something from the public sector into the private sector. It is also sometimes used as a synonym for deregulation whe ...
of services in the British
National Health Service
The National Health Service (NHS) is the umbrella term for the publicly funded healthcare systems of the United Kingdom (UK). Since 1948, they have been funded out of general taxation. There are three systems which are referred to using the " ...
often led to the outsourcing of such work to private contractors. When
Homerton University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust proposed in 2020 to extend its soft facilities management contract with ISS Mediclean until 2025 170 of the trust’s 464 doctors complained to the chief executive that their colleagues in cleaning, portering, catering and security services received worse pay and worse terms and conditions than NHS employees, including only statutory sick pay.
See also
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Orderly
In healthcare, an orderly (also known as a ward assistant, nurse assistant or healthcare assistant) is a hospital attendant whose job consists of assisting medical and nursing staff with various nursing and medical interventions. The highest ro ...
References
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Health care occupations