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Job overview

Visiting hospital is not fun. And for some people, just getting to their hospital appointments and back home again is tough. It’s for these reasons that we need people who can make arranging transport the easy part.

Our Patient Transport Service (PTS) provides NHS-funded transport for people who can’t get to their healthcare appointments by other means. Could you help arrange those journeys for our patients?

Main duties of the job

As an apprentice call handler for the Patient Transport Service (PTS) you will divide your time between actively participating in your NVQ studies and being the first point of contact for both patients and health care representatives (HCRs) making safe and effective transport booking arrangements.

We are looking for someone who likes to talk and is confident using IT. The majority of your role will be speaking to patients, their carers and healthcare professionals who are looking to arrange journeys to and from healthcare settings, then accurately recording the information they give you into our booking system. Of course, it’s not always as easy as it sounds because everyone has their own challenges, but if you’re the sort of person who finds reward in helping people, then we’d love to hear from you.

To make sure we provide the right type of transport to the people who need it the most, we have a set questions that we need to ask all callers. Sometimes you’ll need to speak slowly and clearly, sometimes you’ll need to repeat yourself several times, sometimes you’ll need to listen to someone’s troubles and concerns; but you’ll always need to be polite, professional and eager to make the caller’s experience a pleasant one.

20% of your time will be spent studying with Barnsley College to achieve a Customer Service Practitioner Level 2 standard NVQ.  

Working for our organisation

The department is open Monday to Friday between the hours of 7:00am and 7:00pm, and Saturdays and Sundays between 8:00am and 6:00pm, 365 days of the year including public holidays.

Our apprentices work on a rotation pattern Mon-Fri, between 08:00am and 04:00pm, 09:00am and 05:00pm, 10:00am and 06:00pm, with public holidays off.

Apprentices are paid according to annex 21 of Agenda for Change to account for time spent studying. As our apprenticeships are fixed term for 15 months, apprentices will be paid 70% of the starting point of band 3 for the first 3 months, followed by 75% of the starting point of band 3 for the remaining 12 months.