Royal Recognition: DHU Healthcare's IPC Lead Honoured for Outstanding Volunteering Efforts

DHU Healthcare’s Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) Lead was granted an audience with the King to recognise her incredible volunteering work.

Mandie Jarvis is DHU’s IPC Practitioner and was invited to His Majesty King Charles III’s garden party at Buckingham Palace in May, to recognise her education and skills work with St John Ambulance.

A major honour, Mandie spends around 500 hours every year providing training and event support for the charity alongside her DHU day job, ensuring patients and colleagues are kept safe and our clinical environments remain clean.

Mandie told us: “When I got the invite I initially thought it was a joke and to this day I still don’t know who nominated me, but it was such a thrill once the realisation kicked in that it was genuine. You don’t do what I do for the accolades but to be recognised like this was tremendous.

“If I could summarise the experience in three words it would be surreal, exquisite and beautiful. We’ve all seen or stood outside the gates of Buckingham Palace so to be able to walk through the gates and round the back to the gardens, to experience the pomp and ceremony first hand is so difficult to put into words.”

Mandie’s DHU role involves ensuring our people and places are up to strict and robust infection control standards from the basics of bare below the elbow and hand hygiene to the complexities of mask wearing for airborne diseases and vaccinations. But her interest and commitment to cleanliness standards goes beyond that. 

“I sit on an expert advisory IPC group to bring my skills and experience to a national level,” Mandie explains. “I’m Regional IPC Lead for St John Ambulance and that involves me delivering training, courses, giving advice and more to everyone in the service from cadets to ambulance crews. It’s an honour to do it and I love to be able to make a difference.

“I think it’s a wonderful thing that people like me can be honoured and made a fuss of once in a while. It’s not why we do what we do but it puts a spring in your step, makes you realise that you’re doing something right and it has given me a memory I will take with me forever.”