Response from Volunteering England on the framework for the registration of health and adult social care providers
Volunteering England is the integrated national volunteering development organisation for England. We work across the private, public and third sectors to raise the impact of volunteering as a powerful force for change. In particular, we are working to improve the capacity of the volunteering infrastructure. We are the accountable body for the Volunteering National Support Services and accredit and brand the network of local Volunteer Centres. We are a Strategic Partner of the Cabinet Office (Office of the Third Sector) and a National Agent for the Department of Health Opportunities for Volunteering Scheme.
This response has been considered within Volunteering England and also by the Project Reference Group for the Enhancing Volunteering in Health and Social Care Project – membership attached.
Volunteering England uses the Compact definition of volunteering which is
"an activity that involves spending time, unpaid, doing something that aims to benefit the environment or someone (individuals or groups) other than, or in addition to, close relatives"
Within health and social care settings volunteers carry out more than one hundred different roles in the NHS, Local Authorities, Voluntary and Community Sector organisations and some private care providers – these roles are listed in the Health and Social Care pages
We know these volunteers help to deliver more personalised services and have worked with six NHS Trusts to evaluate their volunteering service. The individual service evaluations are available on our Impact Assessment page and the summary report will be published in July.
We also know that volunteers can sometimes enable the statutory services to access ‘hard to reach’ groups as volunteers are perceived to be more approachable and less ‘official’ than staff.
Volunteering England welcomes this more coherent system of registration across health and adult social care, given that most service users and patients are concerned with the quality of support they receive, by both paid staff and volunteers. We also welcome similar registration requirements to ensure all types of service meet the same standards.
Volunteering England particularly welcomes the following sections in the proposed framework.
15. Checking that workers (including volunteers) are safe and competent to give people the care and treatment they need
16. Having enough competent staff (not including volunteers) to give people the care and treatment they need
17. Supporting workers (including volunteers) to give people the care and treatment they need
This recognises that volunteers are part of the care team and should be supported, trained and checked in the same way as all other staff, but that they are not included in the total when calculating whether it is safe to deliver a service. This supports our view that volunteers should not be a substitute for paid staff but that their contribution adds value. In 17 it would be useful to provide an example about effective management of volunteers as this will enhance the quality of services provided by volunteers, as recommended by Commission on the Future of Volunteering, Baroness Neuberger’s Review of Volunteering in Health and Social Care, and the DH Strategy for Volunteering.
Volunteering England would like to see further consideration given to
- How the regulatory process will assess and measure those services that provide added value, such as a Registered Care Home that encourages volunteer befrienders to provide support to isolated individuals, compared to a Care Home that does not offer that service. Our concern is that the regulatory framework will set minimum standards rather than encourage excellent standards, such as providing more diverse and personalised services. For example, some football clubs support reminiscence volunteers who visit elderly fans, to talk about matches from the past etc. A Care Home that welcomed and supported these volunteers would offer more personalised services than one that did not, but the framework could be seen as simply checking that these volunteers had been CRB – checked rather than what added value they brought to the individual and the care setting.
Volunteering England would also like to see the development of consistent standards around measuring the contribution of volunteers and supporting and managing them to provide a positive and consistent service to clients and service users. For example, collecting consistent data re
- How many volunteers there were in any registered service
- How many hours of volunteering time were given each week/month/year.
- The roles carried out by volunteers
- The demography of the volunteers and its match to the service user group.
Sheila Hawkins
Head of Volunteering (Health and Social Care)
Volunteering England
0116 289 3114
Sheila.Hawkins@volunteeringengland.org
