Willie’s story: Patient services - adding years to life

I first started working at this hospital as a temporary dishwasher. I was made permanent dishwasher in 2008 then worked my way up to cashier, retail supervisor, administration assistant then started working in operations as an operations manager.

Up until this point I was working for a company called Morrison. In 2019 Sodexo took over providing the services at the hospital where I was working. The vice president and the president of the hospital asked me to stay on, so I did.

After transferring over to Sodexo I continued working in operations for a while then took a job in patient services.

As a patient services manager I start my day early. I get to the hospital at around 4am and my focus is to get the kitchen ready for the start of service. I turn on the ovens, warm up the grills, put water on the stove and run the dishwasher. I get everything ready so that when my team arrive, nothing is standing in their way of cooking breakfast.

We serve breakfast from 6am until 8am. And between 11:15am and 12:30pm my focus is the lunch service. Outside of those times I have meetings, briefings with the morning and evening shift teams and handle paperwork.

The hospital’s slogan is “adding years to life” and I really believe that is what I do.

A lot of the people who come into the hospital, are not asking you to perform surgery, what they really need is someone to listen. The conversations I have with individual patients about their food are always about more than just food. It’s about each patient feeling that they are listened to. That their choices matter. And knowing that we keep our promises.

If a patient asks for something, I will bring it to them straight away. This often takes patients by surprise. I believe that doing this isn’t anything special, I’m just doing my job. But I see that it makes a huge difference to patients. It’s something special for them. And that makes it even more important that I keep doing it.