There are thousands of volunteers in the NHS. Find out how they make a difference.
There are, in fact, around 100 roles open to volunteers, from assisting with administration and meeting and greeting to holding patients’ hands during eye operations or simply taking the time to sit and chat to patients who may not have any family or friends to visit.
"Volunteers add huge value to the NHS and help to personalise the services we offer,” says Sheila Hawkins, the project manager for Volunteering England. "I’m sure the NHS could run without volunteers, but they make it a richer service.”
Diane Bown, the head of volunteering for the Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust, agrees wholeheartedly. "Volunteers are the icing on the cake. The analogy I use is to compare our volunteering programme, where volunteers visit patients and keep them company, to a fairy cake. If it's just sponge, you can eat it, but put a bit of icing on it and it’s so much more palatable. What the volunteers do is the human, social stuff. They can sit on the wards and play Scrabble from the beginning to the end without getting called away.”
Diane says the trust's community befriending scheme is a good example of how volunteers really ease the pressure on staff. "The scheme is to help people who are socially isolated. Volunteers make sure these people don't feel alone, perhaps by sitting with them in the cinema or having a coffee and a chat. It makes an enormous difference to how people feel. If we had to pay for this work, it would be an incredibly luxurious way of using the NHS.”
Volunteering to work in health is not a new idea and began before the NHS existed. Before 1948, if people couldn’t pay for healthcare, they relied on the kindness of volunteers such as retired nurse Candy Baker and her father, who fundraised to help them pay for treatment. Many hospitals were founded through voluntary activity.
Since 1948, the healthcare system has relied much less on volunteers, but they still perform a valuable role in many hospitals and trusts, and not just day to day. Hawkins says: "If you have an established volunteer base, then you have useful people to call upon in an emergency. When London was bombed on 7/7, University College London Hospital called upon its volunteers to help in all kinds of ways, from fetching and carrying to keeping patients company.”
Why become an NHS volunteer?
A volunteering role is unpaid and can range from two hours to a few days a week, depending on the volunteer's other commitments.
Hawkins stresses that everyone has something to offer, whatever their age or background. “People volunteer because they want to help others,” she says, “and lots of younger people also volunteer because they’re interested in a career in healthcare. Volunteering can either help them gain experience, which is good for their CV, or it can help them make much more informed career choices.”
There are also instances where volunteering can have a positive effect on a volunteer’s own health and wellbeing. Diane Bown specialises in running groups with mental health and learning disabilities. “About 40% of our volunteers have their own mental health issues. It can do so much good for somebody’s self-confidence and feelings of self-worth,” she says. “They get good feelings about how they are contributing to society and you see them blossoming. This means their own mental health is better and they are making fewer demands on our clinical services, so the trust benefits as well.”
- The NHS 60 content, including this article, was written in 2008 to mark the 60th anniversary of the NHS.
