Laura Sharples has been passionate about science since she was a child, with her favourite childhood toy being a pretend microscope, which she used to examine insects in the garden. Now the 25-year-old is helping scientists in the lab inspect bugs of a very different kind in order to monitor the health of young patients at Alder Hey children’s hospital in Liverpool.
Sharples has worked as a medical laboratory assistant for a year and is part of a team helping to prepare and process pathology samples in areas such as microbiology, haematology, biochemistry, newborn screening and histology. From growing bacteria cultures in order to test for dangerous infections such as MRSA to spinning blood to check for results which indicate if a child has cancer, her work plays a vital role in patient care and treatment at the hospital.
“One of my favourite parts of the job is going onto the wards and doing routine testing for bugs such as MRSA,” she says. “I don’t think people realise how important that is, but if you have poorly kids, the slightest bugs in the air that they are breathing in from the vents can really mean life and death to some of the patients.”
Tom Knight is a ward chef at Alder Hey, providing an on-demand food service to young patients. He had previously worked for a prestigious hotel chain in London, but was motivated to take up the job in his home city after his nephew fell ill and needed hospital treatment. Like Sharples, he relishes the opportunity to be on the wards and meet the children and their parents. He works closely with clinical staff, such as nurses and dietitians, to ensure the children are receiving the best food to aid their recovery.
Knight says: “Often in the past, the food trolley went up to the wards and the meal was just served without any interaction with the patients. Now we can see if the child is eating properly and, if not, we can talk to the child directly to find out what might be wrong and give them the option of eating something different. Food is like a second medicine – if we can give them a good meal, they will get out of hospital a lot quicker. It really does work.”
Sharples and Knight are among thousands of healthcare support workers around the UK whose roles are vital to the running of NHS services. Yet despite making up almost 40% of the workforce, they are often overlooked in favour of clinical staff such as nurses and doctors.
A Skills for Health and National Skills Academy for Health campaign, Our Health Heroes, launched in February to redress the balance and celebrate these unsung workers. The online campaign is raising awareness of the significant role the support workforce plays in patient care. As part of the campaign, the public have been invited to share their personal experiences and thank these staff for their contribution to health services via Twitter and Facebook using the hashtag #OurHealthHeroes.
It was due to the campaign’s success and the variety of stories that were shared as part of the movement that Skills for Health recognised the message it was promoting had gravitas and, after being approached by a leading children’s hospital, decided to use the campaign to take a closer look at the unique role of support workers in paediatric care. So from 31 May to 3 June, Our Health Heroes will focus on the stories of these important healthcare staff.
Candace Miller, director of the National Skills Academy for Health, says 60% of all interactions with people in need of care and their families are with support workers. Their roles are especially important in children’s healthcare.
She says: “The care, compassion and expertise which they provide patients is the bedrock of great services but that is especially the case within paediatric healthcare, where the whole family experiences a particularly challenging and emotional time when a baby or child is unwell.
“That is why the National Skills Academy for Health is absolutely committed to ensuring that healthcare support workers are valued for the contributions they make and supported to develop the skills they need, and it is why we want to draw attention to #OurHealthHeroes, wherever they work.”
Melissa Swindell, interim director of HR at Alder Hey, supports that view. She believes the hospital’s support workforce are the “lifeblood” of the organisation and the “glue that holds it all together”, enabling the clinicians to get on with the detailed and complicated work that they need to do treating patients and families.
Parents are just as important as the children and she says the hospital’s support staff understand that. She recalls the story of a porter, whose job it is to take the children to the operating theatre. He turned the journey through the hospital into a fun game; not only did this make the frightened child feel a little more relaxed, the parents were also at ease afterwards.
Swindell says: “Our support staff understand their role in helping clinicians do their job. If you take that example, the little boy turned up to the anaesthetic room calmer, but the mum and dad were also happier.”
Being able to make children and their families as comfortable as possible during their time in hospital is exactly the reason Linda Mosley became a housekeeper for the neuroscience ward at Bristol Royal hospital for children. From helping children choose their meals from the menu to ordering clinical and non-clinical stock for the ward, she claims no two days are ever the same and she is proud to do a job which makes a difference to the lives of so many patients and their families.
“I really care about the work I do and am proud to do it,” she says. “It’s such a rewarding job even though it is stressful sometimes. We are in the middle of everything and are the agony aunts of everyone from parents to nurses and doctors. I feel like everyone on the ward is my family and I am their mum.”
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