Claire Hunter-Girdler. Image: Steve Forrest
Who do people see when they think of NHS staff? Probably doctors, nurses and paramedics. But there are hundreds of thousands of people working in non-clinical support roles as part of One Team for patient care.
The One Team Awards are held each year to recognise those UNISON members working in the NHS in non-clinical support and operational services roles. Any member or branch can nominate a colleague they feel deserves an extra bit of credit and appreciation.
This year the judges were blown away by the range and quality of entries. But there were three winners…
Claire Hunter-Girdler: saving the lives of the lifesavers
Claire Hunter-Girdler (below) confesses to being “a bit of a geek” for the Northwest Ambulance Service (NWAS), having worked in various capacities since she started in 2020 – and missing no opportunity to champion it.
She has recently started working as an admin officer, but it was her previous role, as a wellbeing officer in Cheshire and Mersey, that earned her a well-deserved UNISON One Team Award.
“As soon as you see someone walk through your door in your hour of need, and they’re in that green uniform, you automatically give a sigh of relief,” she says of her frontline colleagues. “But we forget the toll it can have on them.”
Claire’s role was to support staff by offering them guidance and signposting them to services that could support their physical, mental and emotional health.
As with all of this year’s One Team Award winners, her caring nature and commitment to her colleagues extended far beyond her job description. Claire understood that ambulance service workers were mostly out on the road, so decided to follow them, organising events across Cheshire and Mersey in places she knew the workforce would be.
“We packed everything up into events vehicles and went to as many hospitals as we could to try and spread the wellbeing joy,” she says. At the events, she used everything from rage rooms and therapy dogs to holistic therapy and just simple conversation to offer people the help they needed.
Claire was nominated for the One Team Award by Samuel Collins-Berry, a paramedic and the UNISON branch convenor. Samuel says that Claire’s impact on people’s lives became “overwhelmingly clear” after the trust launched a consultation into disbanding her wellbeing team. As part of its response to the consultation, the union asked its members for their experiences of its work – and Claire was named personally by many of them.
“Some of the responses were about very, very personal things. It was serious life events, like bereavement, abuse, trauma. And the thing that was coming through was just how out of her way Claire had gone to help them – far in excess of what her job role was.
“We had people who wrote to us to say it’s only through Claire that they’re still with us today. And by ‘still with us’, I don’t mean still doing the job – I mean, they’re still alive. That impact is massive, really.”
Says Claire: “Winning this has given me the opportunity to show my children that their mum is someone who can make a difference regardless, whether she’s on the frontline or not.”
Murielle Korri: jack of all trades
Murielle Korri (below) is a district nurses administrator at Parsons Green Health Centre, part of the Central London Community Healthcare NHS Trust.
Murielle is responsible for the administration of four teams of nurses at the health centre, 30 nurses in total. The core of her job is relaying messages between patients, managers and nurses. But she does far more than that; other tasks include facilitating urgent callouts, ordering equipment, maintaining a database of supplies, managing appointments and data analysis.
“I call myself a jack of all trades, because people come to me for absolutely everything,” she says. “And it’s not just the nurses; sometimes it’s anyone in the building.”
One example of Murielle’s round-the-clock sense of duty is the simple, but vital act of ensuring the phones are diverted to the relevant on-call nurse. “They change the divert on a Saturday sometimes, which means I have to bring the phone home to do it,” she says. “I’m always available, I would say 24/7.”
Murielle has worked for the NHS since 1991. Her first job was to bring immunisation equipment into schools for vaccinations. She went on to become a data analyst, before being made redundant from that role in 2013, prompting the move to her current position.
It can be challenging to juggle the variety of demands made on her, especially when they come all at once. But despite the pressures, Marielle is known for going the extra mile for her workmates.
“People come to me for everything, even if it’s not work related. ‘I need new home insurance, can you help me find the cheapest one?’ or ‘Can you type me this letter’. I will add it to my list of duties. I do enjoy helping people.”
Ellie Rumball: going the extra mile
Ellie Rumball (below) is a senior administrator in occupational health at Northampton General Hospital, a position she has held for two years. She was previously a healthcare assistant at St Andrews Hospital in the same town.
“I’ve been working in healthcare for most of my adult life, really flitting about everywhere,” says Ellie. “I cannot stay away from healthcare. I just think it’s really rewarding.”
Her main role in the occupational health clinic is dealing with management referrals and ill health assignments – Ellie and her team helping members of staff who experience physical or mental health issues.
“I’m streamlining the referrals and making sure they’re seen by the appropriate people,” she says. Among her duties is helping members of staff eligible for ill health retirement. “It’s quite a lengthy process and it can be really stressful. I just make sure all of that goes as smoothly and as painlessly as possible for the staff.”
Ellie feels a similar reward in her current job to when she was working on the clinical side – before she was helping patients, and now she’s helping staff. “And it feels really nice to be contributing to the place that I work in, helping my colleagues.”
She was nominated by Katherine Turner, also a senior administrator in the occupational health team. “Ellie is a lovely, lovely woman,” says Katherine. “She seems to be able to get along with any group, any kind of situation. She’s very empathetic, sees all sides. She’s been such a complement to our department.”
Ellie received the news of her award while on maternity leave. “My manager called me shortly before the UNISON team did, and she was like, ‘are you sitting down?’ It’s nice that I’ve been recognised, but my team is obviously all doing a really great job. And I wouldn’t be able to do a good job if it wasn’t for the support of everyone else.”
One Team for patient care: https://unsn.uk/one-team
