A Day in the Life of Mark Hough, Team Leader of the Portering Team – Birmingham Children’s Hospital Facilities

What is your job title, team and role within the team?

I am the Team Leader of the Portering Team at the Children’s Hospital. We are based on the Facilities corridor on the lower ground floor and there are 19 of us in total.

 

How would you describe a typical day/ shift?

I usually arrive before 8am and I start the day by allocating the porters their daily duties. These can range from medical records deliveries to gas and equipment deliveries, patient transfers and the biggest part of the job, the management and removal of all waste, be it clinical, general or confidential, on the hospital site. We are also responsible for bed and cot moves, furniture removal, chain of evidence deliveries, attending crash calls, managing the post room and helping out with linen deliveries.

 

What do you enjoy most about your work?

The most important thing to the team is patient care as we are involved in most day-to-day patient transfers on the site. However, the team are enormously proud of the constant work they do keeping the site clear of waste, furniture, beds, cots and other obstacles.

 

What achievement are you most proud of?

I can’t talk for the entire team because they all work tremendously hard and always with a sense of pride in the work that they do but for me, delivering exceptional patient care is what gets me out of bed in the morning.

 

Not a lot of people know this but……

I have both a tropical and a marine aquarium at home and a collection of over 30 exotic fish.