Jayne's story

Jayne King
Head of Security

“We have to prepare for every eventuality at St Thomas’. When the Prime Minister was admitted the biggest issue for us was the press. There were dozens of camera crews and other media in Lambeth Palace Road with their zoom lenses.  Most media are well behaved but some are unscrupulous.

Fortunately we already had plans to put a six foot metal fence round the site with screen netting to protect patients and staff coming in by ambulance up the A&E ramp. One tabloid had published a picture of our staff on the front page which they felt was intrusive.

We fence the site every New Year’s Eve to stop people using it to watch the fireworks so that was a familiar task for us. We have to maintain the integrity of the site to provide a service to patients.

We discovered one media organisation had hired a room on the 13th floor of the Park Plaza hotel, next door, and were using their cameras to look in through the hospital windows. We could see their cameras so we knew.

One member of staff was approached on social media and offered a sum of money to take photos on the wards. They came and told us.  That was fabulous honesty.

We are used to dealing with VIPs. They are like any other patient but they may bring other people with them. We liaise with other security teams on a regular basis. Because of our location we are very well versed in dealing with these incidents.

Our job is to provide a safe environment for patients, staff and visitors. And to protect our assets. If we have assets that aren’t available to the public we may become vulnerable. We wouldn’t normally put PPE and hand sanitiser on the risk register. But bottles of hand sanitiser were selling for £10 or £20 and we had huge quantities coming in.

No visitors were allowed on site, only people working for the Trust, and we needed extra security staff. The Park Plaza hotel were putting staff on furlough so we took some of them instead. They have more of a concierge type role, meeting and greeting. They were excellent perimeter staff. They would say ‘Good morning’, ‘Are you staff?’, ‘Can you get your ID badge out?’. Then at the building entrance:  ‘Please use the hand gel’, ‘Remember to socially distance’. And all done with a smile.   

We had a lot of compliments from staff about that. Seeing people there securing the site and doing it with a smile gave them reassurance. It was inspirational. 70% of what we do is customer service. It made me sit down and reflect that absolutely we need all of that. I am going to look at the customer care package at the Park Plaza Hotel when we are back to normal to see what we can learn from them.

It meant we could leave the perimeter to the hotel security staff while the hospital security focused on what they are trained to do – managing violence in A&E, protecting the vulnerable elderly, dealing with high emotion in the children’s hospital. How can we marry the two? That is the challenge. 

Violence against staff is our biggest issue. Verbal violence and abuse as well as physical. It is not what you come to work for and you shouldn’t have to endure it.  The fear of abuse can be as bad as the abuse itself. In fact, because there were fewer people coming to A&E there was less violence and it was more manageable.

We do have incidents where people turn up desperate to see a dying relative. In those cases we call the nurse practitioners who check the clinical condition of the patient and come down and talk to the relative. We did facilitate visits for end of life patients.

The hardest thing for me was reassuring my staff and keeping them safe. Security staff are vulnerable. We were coming in every day, using public transport, dealing with people. We could see the patients in the hospital were very poorly.  We knew if we followed procedures – washings hands, socially distancing – and did it properly we would be OK. By sharing experiences we kept ourselves safe.

What made me angry was seeing posts on social media saying it was all a hoax, or caused by 5G phone masts or not real. Really? Then you had world leaders saying it could be cured by bleach.

My wife is a nurse at the hospital and we have an 8 year old son. We were coming in by train from Kent every day. We stopped watching the news. It just didn’t relate to what we were seeing in the hospital.

The best thing was the way we all worked together as one family and cut through the red tape. I have worked in the NHS for 29 years and I saw one ward transformed into a COVID-19 ward in 4 days. It was amazing. It is just about saying  ‘we are going to do this’.”

The photographs in this story were taken at different stages of the COVID-19 response with varying guidance for personal protective equipment (PPE) and social distancing.