David Lammas is a 19-year-old housekeeping team leader at London’s busy St Thomas’s hospital. He supervises around 30 staff in the north wing of the building, which includes part of the maternity department. From mopping, buffing and stripping the floors to dusting and changing bins, every day they work tirelessly to ensure the environment is spotlessly clean and free from harmful bacteria that can lead to dangerous infections such as MRSA.
He joined the department as an apprentice when he was 16 and is one of thousands of healthcare support workers around the UK whose roles are vital to the running of health services.
“Receiving positive feedback from patients and helping people is the joy of the job,” Lammas explains. “There is never a day when I have woken up and thought that I don’t want to go to work today. My job really does mean a lot to patients.”
He adds: “As a hospital we are like a tree and every department is a branch. Without one of those branches, the hospital can’t function. Although housekeeping is seen as the bottom of the tree, it is essential to providing high quality care for patients.”
Nevertheless, support workers are often overlooked by politicians discussing the future of the health service and forgotten by the media in favour of clinical staff such as nurses and doctors. That is despite support workers making up almost 40% of the healthcare workforce.
Redressing the balance
A Skills for Health and National Skills Academy for Health campaign, Our Health Heroes, launches on 9 February to redress the balance and celebrate these unsung workers. From healthcare assistants who are involved in clinical interventions such as taking pulses or checking temperatures to ward housekeepers and cleaners, these employees are central to health services at every level.
The online campaign will raise awareness of the significant role the support workforce plays in the delivery of patient care. The public are being invited to share their personal experiences and thank these staff for their contribution to health services via Twitter and Facebook using the hashtag #OurHealthHeroes.
Support workers are frequently people’s first port of call with health services – whether that is phoning to get an appointment or being fed and watered while spending time in hospital – and often have more patient contact than doctors and nurses.
Ian Wheeler, head of research and evaluation at Skills for Health, hopes the campaign will raise awareness of the different roles support workers fulfil. If we continue to ignore the crucial jobs they do, he says, there is a danger that these loyal staff will eventually become disengaged.
Wheeler adds that developing support workers could help reduce pressure on doctors and nurses. For example, assistant practitioners in hospitals could be trained to help nurses with patient assessments and drug administration. While in primary care, support workers could be utilised better to help ease the burden on GPs by assessing patients with minor health needs themselves.
Wheeler says: “There are lots of different types of support worker at different levels of the system. We need to respect that and we need to make them more visible so everyone around them can understand what they are doing.
“Many of these people have been working in the NHS for 30 years or more and they are very loyal to their local providers. The loyalty they show through the extra hours they put in is remarkable.
“I speak to a lot of support workers in my role and they say that given the opportunity many of them would like to see what more they could contribute.”
Access to training and development opportunities for support workers is therefore an issue which needs to be addressed. Currently just 5% of the training budget is spent on support workers, according to Christina McAnea, Unison national secretary for health. Unison is supporting the Our Health Heroes campaign and McAnea believes investing more in this workforce will have a positive impact on patient care.
Although many support workers will get basic health and safety training, they won’t necessarily be taught how to respond to dementia or how to look at child and adult protection issues. McAnea says being trained how to “speak up” when you see a problem that needs addressing is hugely important to avoid another Mid Staffs hospital scandal.
“If you are in a ward, even if you are just responsible for delivering mail to the ward, if you happen to notice that patients are a bit unkempt or not being cared for properly, you should be trained in how to report it,” she says.
“We have had instances of union members who have tried to speak up but have been told that it is nothing to do with them, that they are only healthcare assistants or cleaners. So it is getting the message across that when trusts or health organisations are training on speaking up or how you intervene when you see something going on, this should cover everybody in that hospital.”
Importantly, valuing support workers’ contributions to healthcare and supporting them in their jobs will not only help other health professionals perform at their best but will benefit the very people the workforce strives everyday to serve – the patients.
Find out how you can get involved in the #OurHealthHeroes campaign here
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