Stewart Jordan is Theatre Manager at Queenswood. Here Stewart tells us about his critical role as the Quality Lead/Supervisor in our onsite Covid-19 testing facility. The Queenswood community extends their grateful thanks to the testing team and in particular to Stewart, Ian Williams (Bursar), Paul Keen (Health & Safety Officer) and Jean Lewsley (IT Technician).

Sitting at a computer directing several different departments in a live event involving several hundred people – this is not unfamiliar to me in my role at Q as Theatre Manager. However, over the last week my setting has been very different.

As part of the drive to get Q back to onsite teaching I volunteered to take on the role of Quality Lead/Supervisor in our Covid-19 Test Centre, swapping Box Office for reception, the live show for testing/processing stations and my lighting/sound/AV desk for a result-logging station.

The Government announcement of the plan to test all students prior to return and twice subsequently gave us limited time to upscale our onsite testing team from one station, three staff, one hour a week, to eight stations, over 23 staff, six full working days and a vast amount of data to gather, process, upload and archive.

Enter (stage left) the core organisational team, Ian Williams, Paul Keen, Jean Lewsley and myself working together to plan the project and subsequently, with classic Q spirit, a cross-departmental team that stepped in to build testing stations, prepare and stock the test facility, create a data handling strategy and train up to administer and perform the testing process. I am delighted to say that working closely with so many of my colleagues who previously in some cases I've known only by sight/name has been a really joyful experience. Their willingness to pitch in, work hard and diligently whist retaining a sense of fun has made what could have been a fairly dry onerous task a really pleasant week.

By the time this article is published the team will have processed over 1200 tests, donned copious masks, aprons, visors and over 2400 pairs of gloves with (at time of writing) all negative results.