PorterPing

What PorterPing does

Transport jobs — patient moves, samples, documents, a supply run for a ward — dispatched to porters with response-time SLAs that escalate before they break. A job can name the unit it serves, so a ward pulls its own runner list out of the hospital board, and the porter’s clock stops when they say it is delivered rather than when the ward gets round to ticking it.

How you actually use it

1. 1Raise the jobNew job takes the kind — patient transfer, sample run, equipment, pharmacy run or other — where it is from, where it goes, and normal or urgent; naming the ward store room it serves needs the ward-stores read permission, and the form says so when you do not have it.
2. 2Assign it to a free porterAssign to… offers only porters who are active and carry no open job, because the database keeps one open job per porter and refuses the second.
3. 3Walk it through the stepsPicked up and then Delivered each stamp their own time, and the database refuses a step taken out of order or a job put back to an earlier one.
4. 4Let somebody else confirm it arrivedIt arrived is drawn for anyone with the porter read permission, and the database refuses the confirmation when the person pressing it is the person who pressed Delivered.
5. 5Read the two clocksEach row carries an assign clock and a run clock computed from the stamps against the targets printed on the form — urgent 10 and 30 minutes, normal 20 and 60 — and the run clock stops at delivery, not at the confirmation.

What it does not do

It does not reveal why a patient is being moved — porters see the where, not the what. And it does not let anybody close their own delivery: the person who pressed Delivered cannot be the person who confirms it arrived.

Questions clinics ask