“A silent army of volunteers working behind the scenes in the health service is providing an invaluable service,” said Dr. Justin Davis Smith, Chief Executive of Volunteering England. “The findings from this report clearly show that voluntary work of this kind not only helps the NHS, but also the community and the volunteers themselves.”
Dr. Davis Smith was commenting on a pilot study being launched today, which assesses the impact of volunteering within NHS Trusts, focusing on five trusts across the country. The study was carried out for the Department of Health by Volunteering England’s Research team, the Institute for Volunteering Research. Some trusts found that volunteers provided added value to services in hospitals and other NHS services. It was also found that volunteering helped the community by encouraging local people to participate in delivering services to the community.
Some trusts estimated that the economic value of volunteering averaged around £700,000 a year in hospital trusts, £500,000 a year in mental health trusts and £250,000 a year for the primary care trust.
Care Services Minister, Ivan Lewis said: "Volunteers do an amazing job, they are vital to the lifeblood of the NHS and social care services. This new research underlines what we already knew - that volunteering does not just benefit patients, it makes the volunteers happier too. There is a long established tradition of volunteering across the full range of health and social care settings and to help recognise and support our volunteers we recently launched the start of a consultation on volunteering.
“Volunteering has a huge potential role in providing more flexible, responsive and patient focused
health and social care services. Volunteers play a variety of critical roles, at all levels, providing
mutual benefit to staff, volunteers and service users within health and social care services. We
know that their contribution is essential and can improve the lives of patients and their local communities. I hope this report will encourage NHS managers to encourage more people to volunteer, and support volunteers effectively."
Dr. Davis Smith added: “In some trusts, volunteers were able to overcome social isolation through volunteering, while our analysis has suggested local communities could also benefit from trusts engaging volunteers. We have seen that NHS volunteering can encourage local people to take a bigger role in services and at the same time enhance their skills. Volunteering can also increase the community’s understanding of mental health issues.” | 3
And as well as making both volunteers and those receiving help, feel better, in some cases volunteering also helped volunteers to overcome social isolation by getting them out of the house and giving them the satisfaction of helping others.
‘Giving something back’ was one of the key reasons given for volunteering. Looking at people’s motivation behind volunteering, the study showed that at some trusts people gave up their free time as a ‘thank you’ after they, or their loved ones, had been treated in hospital. Other reasons for volunteering in the NHS ranged from altruism to better employment prospects, while older volunteers tended to cite helping others as their primary motivation. Retired volunteers also talked about wanting to get out of the house, meet new people and give structure to their retirement, whilst younger volunteers were more motivated by career ambitions, looking to gain work experience in a hospital or the opportunity to improve their English skills.
But volunteers at trusts from all age groups talked about feeling better, knowing they had been able to help others.
Trusts found that volunteers appeared to have a positive impact on service users too. At a high security hospital and at a project for elderly disabled people, it was reported that those using the service claimed that volunteers were often the only people they saw who weren’t paid to help them. And at the high security hospital, paid staff felt that the volunteers had a positive impact on patients’ health making it easier for them to reintegrate into the community after their release.
“It is also apparent from the study that some elderly disabled people have said they would not be able to continue to live independently, in their own homes, without volunteers’ help,” Dr. Justin Davis Smith said.
Volunteering in the pilot study trusts was unevenly distributed and managed. Some had few or no volunteers while one had more than 500. In the five selected trusts, volunteers were managed by one or more dedicated volunteer services managers who sometimes had a team of support staff.
“While the findings do not necessarily apply to other trusts or the NHS as a whole, the results come up with some interesting themes that trusts might like to consider when evaluating their own volunteer programmes,” Dr. Justin Davis Smith concluded.
“Trusts involved in the pilots clearly gained huge benefit from their volunteering programmes, although the results of the evaluations also suggest there are issues they need to be aware of, such as the views of paid staff. We hope that this study will help the trusts involved to use this information to refine and develop their volunteering programmes.
“I believe that at the present time, the political climate is more favourable towards involving volunteers to help deliver public services than at anytime since the beginning of the NHS 60 years ago.
“It certainly seems from the study that the NHS gains a great deal from this vast number of volunteers who help care for patients in many different ways across local communities,” Dr Justin Davis Smith added.
Ends
Note to editors:
- The NHS trusts who took part were : Sussex Partnership Trust. Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, Luton and Dunstable Hospital, Wirral Primary Care Trust and Nottinghamshire Healthcare Trust.
- Volunteering England runs a health and social care project aimed at advancing the use of volunteers in the National Health Service (NHS). A key part of the 18 month project was to increase understanding of who were volunteers in the NHS, why and with what effect. The Institute for Volunteering Research (IVR) carried out a series of service evaluations with five NHS trusts to assess the impact of their volunteering programmes. These were funded by the Department of Health (DH) and carried out between autumn 2006 and spring 2008. The trusts involved in the project included acute hospitals, mental health trusts and a primary care trust.
- The project was also designed to test how best to apply IVR’s Volunteering Impact Assessment Toolkit (VIAT) within the NHS. VIAT has been developed over the past three years to enable organisations to assess the difference involving volunteers makes.
- For more information, the summary report, In good health: assessing the impact of volunteering in the NHS, and the full report, Health check: a practical guide to assessing the impact of volunteering in the NHS, is available from Volunteering England, Regent's Wharf, 8, All Saints Street, London N1 9RL.
- Volunteering England aims to improve the quality, quantity, impact and accessibility of volunteering throughout England. For more information please visit www.volunteering.org.uk
- For more information or interviews please contact Mary Ann Day on 020 7520 8932 or email maryann.day@volunteeringengland.org
