A Day in the Life of our Switchboard – Birmingham Women’s Hospital

Who are the Switchboard Team?

We are the BWC Switchboard Team, part of the Facilities Department and based at the Women’s Hospital. We are a team of 16 members with between three to five colleagues working on any of our six daytime shifts or our night shift.

 

How would the team describe a typical shift at work?

Many people think a switchboard operator is someone who just takes telephone calls, but working on the BWC Switchboard entails a lot more! A shift starts with a handover with colleagues finishing their shift. We then scan any 2222 emergency call log scans over to the resus department for their records and check if any on-call doctors need chasing up for that day to update our on-call board and sheet.

 

What are the different tasks that take up most of the team’s time?

We answer external and internal calls for both the Women’s and Children’s hospitals. We take emergency calls from wards, departments and theatres and distribute to the correct people. We bleep staff on request and chase when they don’t reply. To maintain the emergency bleep systems for both sites we conduct daily test calls and regularly test the bleep units by diverting or un-diverting them so they reset to their original numbers. Our front of house duties include greeting and directing patients, visitors and staff and managing enquiries, receiving specimens or small parcels from other hospitals and advising departments we have items for them to collect. We assist patients and staff with emergencies that occur at the main entrance; this could be a lady in labour. We put the daily rotas together for departments that have on-call teams (daytime and out-of-hours) such as Site Lead, Anaesthetics, Chaplaincy, Communications, all on-call Doctors, Haematology and many more.

 

Describe the pace at which the team works – what do they enjoy most about their work?

We can take up to 2,000 calls in any 24-hour period so the pace in the Switchboard office is generally very fast – daytime more so than during the night. We most enjoy interacting with people: other members of our team, the rest of the hospital staff and also our patients and visitors. We at switchboard like to think that we are the heart of the hospitals via the telephone.

 

What skills does the team need to manage the work successfully?

We can deal with some very rude callers so we need to be able to maintain our composure and also have callers who do not have very good communication skills, so we need to be patient and be able to ask questions in a way that allows us to help them (and us too). We need to be able to multi-task and not lose sight of the priorities.