Every portering job is raised by a ward, timed, accepted on a handset and closed on completion. Eleven times a year one arrives for a patient the hospital discharged, and the ward that raised it has no record of raising it.
I have portered at the same hospital for nineteen years and I have carried more people than I could count in either direction.
The system is a job dispatch, the same shape as a courier firm's.
A ward raises a job on their computer: what is needed, from where, to where, and how urgent. It goes into a queue. The supervisor's screen shows it, and it is offered to a handset.
I accept it on the handset, which timestamps it. I do the job. I close it on the handset, which timestamps that too.
The times are the department. Our target from raise to accept is nine minutes and we are measured on it every month.
About eleven times a year I get a job for a patient who is not here.
The job looks completely ordinary on the handset. Ward, bed, patient name, hospital number, destination. Transfer, non-urgent, one porter.
I go up. The nurse in charge looks at the name and says that patient went home on Tuesday, or was discharged last week, or, twice, died in March.
The ward did not raise it.
That is the part that turns it from a bad data entry into something else.
The job carries the raising user. Every job does, because a ward that raises rubbish gets talked to.
I have taken eleven of these to the supervisors' office over the years and asked them to look the job up.
The raising user is the ward's shared account, which is normal: most wards raise jobs from one login at the desk.
The nurses on those wards have all said the same thing, which is that they did not raise it, and I believe them, because a ward with an empty bed does not ask for a porter to move somebody out of it.
The destination.
Every one of the eleven has the same destination.
It is the mortuary.
I want to be careful here because this is a hospital and that is a real place I go to with real people, and there is nothing strange about a portering job to the mortuary. It is part of the work, it is done with respect, and I have done it hundreds of times.
What is strange is a transfer job, raised for a living patient in a bed, to the mortuary, which is not a thing anybody would ever raise. A patient who has died is a different job type with a different procedure and a different form, and it is never raised on a ward computer as a transfer.
The system should not even offer that destination for that job type. I have asked. The supervisor pulled the configuration up and the transfer job type has a destination list on it, and the mortuary is not on the list.
The times.
All eleven were raised between 03:40 and 04:20.
That is the quietest part of the night and there are two of us on. The job sits in the queue for about a minute and comes to whoever is free.
Seven of the eleven have come to me. There are eleven porters on the night rota.
I did that arithmetic in the canteen with a bit of paper and a colleague who does the football pools, and he worked out the odds and then he stopped talking about it.
What I do when I get one.
I go up. That is the job.
I go up, and the nurse tells me the patient is not there, and I close the job on the handset as not required, which is a valid outcome with a reason code, and the reason code I use is patient unavailable.
I have used that code eleven times in nineteen years and every one of them is one of these.
The one I did not close.
In the February of last year I got one for a ward I was already on, which had never happened, and the bed number was the bay I was standing in.
The bed had a patient in it. An older man, asleep, on oxygen, and I knew who he was because I had brought him up from imaging that evening.
The name on my handset was his name. His hospital number, his ward, his bed, and the destination.
I did not go over to him. I went to the desk and I showed the nurse the handset and she went white in a way I have never seen a band seven go white, and she rang the site manager, and the site manager came, and the three of us stood at that desk at ten past four looking at a job on a screen.
The site manager cancelled it at the system end, which she can do and I cannot, and she wrote it up, and I have never seen what she wrote.
He died at twenty past nine that morning. Nothing about it was strange or sudden and his family were with him and the ward had been expecting it for two days.
What I do now.
The same as before, because there is nothing else to do and because I like this job and I am good at it.
The one thing I have changed is that I do not close them as patient unavailable any more. I close them as completed.
The supervisor asked me about it once, because completed on a transfer with no destination scan looks like a porter cutting a corner, and I said I had been closing them wrong for years and would get it right from now on.
He said not to worry about it. And I have gone on closing them as completed, because a job that is not required is a job that will be raised again, and one that is completed is finished, and I would rather it was finished.