What Is A Healthcare Support Worker?

Laura explains the role of a Healthcare Support Worker, giving a rundown of her clinical duties as well as a few tips on how to become one.

Topics covered in this article

Introduction

What Is A Healthcare Support Worker?

My Role As A Healthcare Support Worker

What I Do In The Clinic

What I Love About The Role

My Advice For Becoming A Healthcare Support Worker

Introduction

Hi everyone, my name's Laura. And today I'm gonna be talking to you about my role as a Healthcare Support Worker.

I worked as a Healthcare Support Worker for almost 16 years now.

At the moment I'm working within the pain service in my local hospital and I work part-time.

I work 20 hours a week, which works out two full days and a half day shift.

What Is A Healthcare Support Worker?

The service I work in provides support to patients who are dealing with pain.

So this includes working with a range of different people from Theatre staff, Nurses, Doctors, clinic setting staff, and basically, we provide a service to help the management of pain that the patients are dealing with.

So there's two sides to the pain team.

There's an acute side, which deals with all the patients in the hospital who are dealing with pain.

And there's the chronic side, which deals with people who are in the community who then come to clinic and they're dealing with chronic pain.

So they could have back pain, leg pain, neck pain, and it's our job to just help them manage that to the best of their ability and to help them live their life in a normal way.

And it's about helping them manage the pain.

So they're not feeling like they're living a life that's restricted.

My Role As A Healthcare Support Worker

I don't really work with the acute side.

I'm more based on the chronic side.

So when we have clinic sessions, I make sure all the clinic is set up.

So all the patient's notes will come to clinic.

I'll make sure they're all in order of the patient's times. I make sure the clinic area's clean and tidy, we've got stock, we've got documents that we hand out to the patient.

I make sure basically everything's there so that session will run as smoothly as possible.

I'll also let me see, I've made some notes.

So I welcome and greet the patients as they come.

I provide reassurance to the patients because a lot of the time when they arrive, sometimes they've been waiting up to two years to come to clinic, so they can be experiencing in a wide range of emotions.

Sometimes they're really happy and relieved to be in clinic.

Sometimes they're nervous about what they're gonna get from our service, are we gonna be able to help them manage their pain?

And it's just about understanding the patient, listening to them and just being a support for them really.

What I Do In The Clinic

When they come to clinic, the consultant normally carries out assessment of the patient and this can involve a physical examination.

So I'll just make sure everything's clean, the bed for the patient to lay down on.

And I'll just be a chaperone to make sure that the patient's as comfortable as possible.

I also help preserve confidentiality and I made sure the patients are treated with dignity and respect, which I can vouch, we all wanna attend a consultation and be treated with respect.

And I communicate in a polite manner.

And I also ensure the consultants have all the information needed.

And then I accurately put the information into their notes.

And then I send them all back to our medical records department.

Another aspect of my job is when the patients come to clinic, sometimes they'll have trigger point injections.

So if a patient's got really bad shoulder pain or neck pain, the consultant will carry out a procedure called a trigger point injection.And I'm just there as a chaperone and to just assist both the patient and the consultant as he carries out this procedure.

Sometimes the patients get referred to Theatre.

So what they'll have a procedure done, sometimes an epidural and they'll have to come to Theatre for that.

When we run a Theatre session, I'm there to meet and greet the patient, bring them into Theatre and then input information onto the Theatre system on the computer.

So I've just gotta make sure everything's accurate and correct.

So that's a little bit about the role.

What I Love About The Role

Working part-time as well as the Healthcare Support Worker, it gives me a good family and work-life balance, 'cause I've got young children, so the job is really flexible around that.

It also gives me opportunities to learn and develop my skills, so recently throughout COVID, I went to work in the recovery setting.

So it gives me to me the opportunity to just learn different things.

My Advice For Becoming A Healthcare Support Worker

If you're interested in being a Healthcare Support Worker, my advice would be to either volunteer here to your local hospital and just get a gauge of what you enjoy, what departments you like.

'Cause there's so many different aspects to working in the hospital.

And another thing you can do is have a look at job opportunities.

There’s loads of different varieties within the hospital.

And a lot of them are flexible around family life, which is really good for people who do have children.

Also, looking online at different roles within other settings apart from hospitals.

So, you know, like health care centres, health parks, just the different areas that it's not just hospitals, there's community settings as well.

It's just looking at all the different varieties of care work, which Healthcare Support Workers work in and seeing which one would work well with you and your interests.

I hope you've enjoyed this talk and I hope it's given you some more information to help you if you are interested in becoming a Healthcare Support Worker.