"Head Porter"

 

Sometime in the mid-90's I had a rather unsettling conversation. I used the term head porter to refer to my boss, the person in change of the JRH porters. The person I was talking to, a domestic supervisor, corrected me; it's “portering manager”, she said severely. I had already found out by then that the OxRad administration placed a bafflingly extreme priority on using the right words; and indeed I had another major lesson many years later, see background link below. The terms “head porter” and “portering manager” are actually very similar to “U-boat” and “submarine” or “astronaut” and “cosmonaut”. They are exactly the same thing, yet they are given different names for psycho-political reasons. George Orwell predicted this would happen. Nevertheless, when the terminology changed there was a massive change in the culture of the hospital and therefore the role played in it by the porters. It happened during the Blair New Labour era which was marked by the massive corporatization of the NHS, which I've discussed too many times to suggest a reference. Image became everything. The Trust spent almost a million pounds revamping the public areas of the hospital to make them look like a combination of a hotel and shopping centre. Since then they have spent even more money doing it again! Yet at the same time waiting lists lengthened and post-operative infections soared. New and virulent superbugs emerged out of nowhere, apparently. In truth it was because of a breakdown in the organization's efficiency and professionalism that led to unsanitary levels of hygiene. One year, five thousand people died of these bugs in NHS hospitals less than a decade after I almost lost my job for refusing to call myself an “ODO”. These people are like dodgy car salesmen, painting over the rust. When I started out on a HP career in 1989 the head porter was usually somebody who had been promoted up through the ranks, with a huge amount of experience and expertize is HPing. Portering managers were brought in from outside. We had a whole series of them and they were usually people who had business college degrees. Most of them had no experience at all in healthcare outside administration. During their orientation they would do their standard two weeks in the lodge, but that does not make you a porter. They usually didn't stay for long. This is why I felt so uncomfortable being corrected when I said “head porter”. I knew, partly subconsciously, that it symbolized the rot. You'll be glad to know that I always called my boss the head porter after that, without exception. I still use that terminology to this day.
See here for background: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2017/07/odo.html.