My Working Day: Phil O'Neill, head of operations and clinical support, Mater hospital, is prepared for the unpredictability of her job by being very organised
My job is very busy and quite challenging. It gives me great satisfaction because I really feel that I can make a positive difference for people visiting the hospital.
I have a number of departments under my remit. Among them are bed management, waiting list co-ordination, medical records and internal and external communication.
First thing in the morning, I check my e-mails and deal with any issues that need urgent attention. One of the great things about this job is that I never know what's going to face me over the course of the day. Given that the job is quite unpredictable means I need to have a good structure surrounding what I do.
I have to do a lot of correspondence and I'm a real stickler for returning phone calls and following up on my dealing with people.
The hospital is very busy. The Mater has a catchment area of about 170,00 people and at present we have about 600 beds and 2,500 staff so there is plenty of need for organisational and support services.
The A&E department is particularly busy and about 50,000 patients attend it annually. I'm the person who deals with the numbers waiting for beds in A&E and because we have targets to meet it's something that I look into first thing in the morning.
It can be a bit of a juggling act because we're trying to get the A&E patients up to their beds and we also have to figure elective admissions into our planning. We have to discharge the patients who have been declared fit to return home.
I work closely with the HSE to bring in initiatives that will speed up and improve the patient experience.
There's a good ethos of communication in the hospital and if patients have problems they tend to come forward and discuss it with the team. We regularly conduct surveys and then go through feedback from patients meticulously.
We also try to make the community fully aware of the services available to them. To do this we have regular communication evenings with people living in the locality. Recently we introduced an on-call doctor service, which means that some patients no longer need to come to the A&E for treatment.
The biggest challenge I face is trying to meet the demand for beds. Trying to achieve a balance between A&E and elective admissions takes a great deal of work.
It gives me great satisfaction when a patient who needs treatment gets to their bed. Also it is great when we successfully resolve an issue with a patient or family who may have become unhappy about something in the hospital.
Seeing them going away happy because their issue has been sorted out is very satisfying.