New NHS portering standards put performance in the spotlight

For a portering service to work well, it is no longer enough simply for jobs to get done. NHS organisations are increasingly expected to understand how well services are performing, where improvements are needed, and whether changes deliver results.

The new NHS England national standards for healthcare portering services make this expectation clear. Alongside requirements covering safety, training, and service delivery, the standards introduce a strong emphasis on governance, monitoring, and continuous improvement. Organisations are expected to assess their performance, identify gaps, develop improvement plans, and provide evidence of progress.

That evidence will matter beyond the portering department. NHS England states that portering services should be embedded within governance structures, including reporting at board level. Reports should cover KPIs, compliance, risks, and improvement actions, while demonstrating how portering contributes to patient safety, operational efficiency, and the overall patient journey.

For hospital leaders, this creates new challenges: how do you know whether a portering service is performing well? Where is demand highest? Are staffing levels appropriate at different times and locations? Which departments experience the longest waits? Are changes to processes actually improving performance?

The standards provide some useful starting points: suggested KPIs include reactivity, measuring the time between an emergency request and porter attendance; punctuality, comparing scheduled and actual arrival times; and efficiency, measuring tasks completed per porter per hour. These measures are intended to support resource planning and capacity management, with performance reviewed at both operational and board level.

Collecting reliable information at this level can be difficult when activity is recorded manually or across disconnected systems. A completed task may tell an organisation that something happened, but not necessarily provide the operational context needed to understand why it took a particular amount of time, where demand was concentrated, or where recurring bottlenecks exist.

Digital technology can turn everyday portering activity into useful operational data. Navenio provides hospitals with real-time location and workflow information using smartphones, without requiring dedicated location infrastructure. As activity takes place, organisations can build a clearer picture of demand, response times, journey times, and how workload is distributed across teams and locations.

This supports another important element of the new standards: the maturity matrix. NHS organisations are encouraged to assess their current position, benchmark performance, set objectives, and develop action plans for improvement. Progress against the standards will also be monitored annually through the Premises Assurance Model (PAM), with organisations expected to provide supporting evidence of improvement.

The new standards therefore represent more than a definition of good portering. They encourage organisations to understand performance objectively and demonstrate how services are improving over time. For Estates, Facilities and Operations leaders, having accurate operational data can provide the evidence needed to move from assumptions about how a service is performing to informed decisions about how it can perform better.