"I am just doing my job" - Elland employee is shortlisted for unsung hero award

‘Just doing my job’ has led to a nomination for a national unsung hero award for health informatics employee Margo Smith.
Margo SmithMargo Smith
Margo Smith

Margo works for Elland-based The Health Informatics Service (THIS) as service delivery operations manager and she will discover if she has won in the IT and digital category when the awards – billed as the only awards for non-medical, non-clinical NHS staff and volunteers - are held in Manchester in November.

THIS provides IT, software, systems and ongoing IT support for over 100 organisations in the healthcare sector - predominantly within the NHS.

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Margo, who has worked for THIS for 18 years, said: “I’m very surprised to be nominated because I don’t feel like I have gone above and beyond. I am just doing my job.

“I do everything and anything. Day-to-day, I have responsibility for our service desk which is a team of 30, I also manage our field support engineers, our stores department and the silver service team.

“Each day is so different, which is what I love about this job. I come into the office and I don’t know what the day ahead will bring.

"Along with my colleagues, we need to ensure we have the right resource in the right place at the right time. We have many projects across the organisations we support, where technical resource is vital.

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"In the world of technology, we do experience outages which can impact patient care and need to ensure we act quickly. I class myself as operational, I like to solve problems and will deal with anything that comes my way.”

Margo has been nominated for the award by Robert Birkett, THIS’s Director of Digital Services, whose nomination reads: “The Health Informatics Service is digitally supporting many different NHS organisations including Acute Trusts, CCGs, ICS, Mental Health, Community, Social Care and Third Sector, even Prisons, and that is where Margo comes to the fore – there isn’t much happening digitally across our region that has not crossed Margo’s desk to some extent, at some point.”

The Unsung Hero Awards were first held in 2015. Its CEO Laura Tomlinson said: “At a time where the staff of the NHS as a whole are widely viewed by the public as being ‘unsung heroes’, there is still a long way to go to increase the awareness of non-medical, non-clinical staff and volunteers in the NHS.”

Margo, who is up against nominees from the South East Coast Ambulance Service, Portsmouth Hospitals University NHS Trust and the Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust, says: “I would be thrilled to win knowing everything we are doing in The Health Informatics Service is helping our customers and ultimately benefitting patient care

“I couldn’t do anything I do without the support of my colleagues, they do an amazing job. I have a good support network, we all work well together.”