Communications Switchboard Operator

**Job overview**:
**Job Title**:Communications Switchboard Operator (Relief Post - covering range of shifts as/when required)**

**Salary/Band**:3**

**Speciality**:Estates & Facilities**

**Care Organisation**:Oldham**

**Contract type and hours**:37.5**

**Main duties of the job**:
As a switchboard operator you will be an essential link in the telephone communication system. The operator is the first point of contact with the public, internal and external medical staff and many other crucial hospital calls. The calls are often critical and the response not straight forward, training and experience are essential when linking callers to their required destination.

**Working for our organisation**:
The Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust (NCA) provides hospital and integrated health and social care services to over one million people living across Greater Manchester. Our 20,000 colleagues care for people in hospital and in the community, working across Bury, Rochdale, Oldham and Salford, to save and improve lives.

As a large NHS trust we are committed to enhancing the health of our local population by delivering consistently high standards of care and working closely with local authorities and key partners. We believe in our power and potential to **make a difference** and we’re always looking for people who demonstrate our three core values - **care**, **appreciate** and **inspire** - to join our team.

In return, we can offer you a job role with purpose and flexibility. The size and scale of the NCA means we can provide more challenge and opportunities so your career can always be moving in the right direction. By joining us you can also access a competitive benefits package, including, a fantastic annual leave allowance, flexible working opportunities and protected hours for health and wellbeing activities, helping you to achieve more personal downtime and a better work-life balance.

**Detailed job description and main responsibilities**:
Professional Duties
- You will answer all incoming calls promptly, within a set maximum target time and connect the caller with the correct recipient or department required.
- You will fully understand and be able to utilise all extensions and switchboard features in the efficient handling of calls and callers.
- As a switchboard operator you will contact via the ‘bleep’ system members of staff who possess receivers and radio pagers.
- You will ensure that the appropriate members of staff and authorities are contacted in the case of fire, security & critical alarms, major incidents, and inclusive of remote site support.
- Take appropriate action to alert emergency teams and personnel for cardiac arrest and medical emergencies such as Head/Full/ED Only Traumas, Red CVA/Stroke.
- To operate VDU consoles, incorporating and extensive internal and external directory in order to manage calls.
- To operate other computer programmes, bleep consoles [LCUs] and be able to generate basic reports from bleep management systems out of hours.
- Monitor and maintain emergency mobile phones are kept at optimum power levels.
- To ensure that on-call departmental rota changes are updated and implemented and to provide varied support to on-call personnel, ensuring that the appropriate members of staff are called for out of hour’s duties.
- To operate patients’ records software when locating patients out of hours.
- To liaise with General Practitioners, in relation to patient admissions.
- To arrange and maintain records for audit purposes for all taxi journeys for patients, samples, and on-call staff, etc.
- To attend Trust mandatory and any other specific training courses as identified and deemed appropriate for the services.
- To undertake as required any other duties as requested by the Telecommunications Manager.
- Facilitate improved communication between departments and service users.
- To highlight potential problems which may impinge on the effective and
- efficient running of the service. i.e., systems fault reporting to I.T Helpdesk.
- Responsible for communicating professionally and effectively to service users.

**Communications and Relationships**
- The switchboard operator is the integral link for the initial communication to staff (normally off site) for the Trust Major Incident Procedures. Essentially the switchboard operator works on their own (without supervision) 75% of the week. The onus is therefore on them to respond swiftly to all situations, often emergency (i.e. major incidents, crash calls or contact a specific medical specialist).
- Other aspects of communication involve, operation of the radio paging equipment, fire/bomb threat calls, arranging emergency journeys out of hours.

**Person specification**:
**Qualifications**:
**Desirable criteria**:

- IT qualification

**Experience**:
**Essential criteria**:

- Experience of working in a busy environment where demands are high on call handling with a requisite to meet departmental pre-determine