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| University College Hospital (courtesy of Andy Worthington, Flickr) |
This
week is Volunteers’
Week 2015, organised by the National Council of Voluntary
Organisations (NCVO) and partner organisations in Scotland, Northern Ireland
and Wales. It’s a great opportunity for the voluntary and community sector to
highlight the roles volunteers play in our communities, hold events and recruit
more people to civic activism (you can follow it using the hashtag #volunteersweek on social media).
I
write because I'm also a volunteer myself, in the NHS. For about two years now,
I’ve been a weekend ward volunteer with University College London Hospitals
(UCLH) NHS Foundation Trust in central London. Three million people in the UK
volunteer for health and welfare organisations and I’m glad to see NHS England
has joined in with Volunteers Week, including
reporting a Royal Voluntary Service/ICM poll on roles the public might like to
play in the NHS. I personally became involved partly because health had become
an interest of mine, but also because in 2012 I’d undergone treatment at two of
UCLH’s constituent hospitals (University College Hospital, where I now do all
my volunteering, and the Heart Hospital in Marylebone) and found myself in good
hands there. I’m also a member of the Foundation Trust – like all
FTs, UCLH is a mutual with a membership and is currently in the process of
electing its Council of Governors for 2015.
However,
I sometimes get the sense that awareness of what NHS volunteering means could
be greater. Back in March, the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary
Organisations (ACEVO) held the Social Leaders Debate in Westminster,
featuring voluntary sector spokespeople for the five biggest UK political
parties, and at one point the discussions turned to the role volunteers played
in public services and the NHS. It was good to see the issue highlighted – the
representatives broadly agreed volunteers had a role in
strengthening and personalising local services. However, several of the
speakers seemed concerned that NHS volunteers may be drafted in to perform
clinical duties, feeling it necessary to stress NHS services shouldn’t be
“dependent” on volunteers.
The
problem here isn’t that these warnings were objectionable – on the contrary, my
issue was that they struck me as perhaps slightly alarmist, though I’m sure the
speakers were well-intentioned. Rest assured, NHS volunteers do not live in an
episode of Casualty. At UCLH volunteers undergo a day of training
and are overseen by full-time staff who run the Trust’s Volunteering Office -
on hand to give us all the support we need – but we do not perform roles that
are in any way clinical, as it would not be appropriate for us to do so. Our
contributions are made elsewhere.
Most
weeks, I start my short three-hour shift at 10.30am on Saturday. One of my main
duties involves taking small shopping orders from patients, going to the shop
downstairs or the ones along Tottenham Court Road. This is an easy way to make
patients a bit more comfortable when family aren’t immediately on hand to get
basics for them (though I like the task of finding more tricky things once in a
while). We can also help them acquire credit for their bedside phones and TVs.
If there’s time, we sometimes get to have extended chats with them – being
banged-up in hospital can be a tedious experience, as we all find out at some
point in our lives, so relieving the boredom can be a useful service even if
it’s only for a short while.
After
12 o'clock, catering staff begin serving lunch floor-by-floor - UCLH ward
volunteers are trained to help feed patients who cannot do it themselves,
provided they don’t have a ‘green sheet’ by their bed (specialist cases only
clinical dieticians can handle). Usually I find not many patients need this
kind of support, but it is sometimes time-intensive and will need to be
provided by hard-working nurses/HCAs if family members or volunteers are not on
hand, so the presence of just a few volunteers can be valuable in allowing NHS staff
to prioritise.
Sometimes, we go around the wards collecting survey data on one of UCH’s iPads –
this helps the hospital get vital feedback from patients about their
experiences and find out how it is scoring on the NHS-wide Friends and Family Test (“Would you
recommend this service to friends and family?”). And once back in June 2013, I
had one of the stranger experiences of a lifetime when I took part in a
Chemical Biological Radiological Nuclear (CBRN) major-incident drill. This
involved being part of a team of volunteers playing the role of “causalities”
to help staff practice decontamination efforts (the one and only time I’ve ever
worn scrubs – see pic below). Elsewhere in the trust, other UCLH volunteers
work in welcoming and guiding roles, in the patient’s library and manning the
radio station, Citybeat. Others with the right qualifications in their
backgrounds also work with the Trust to provide complementary therapies
(massage, reflexology, aromatherapy etc).
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| Covering in UV
talcum powder at UCH, so that we could see if we'd been properly "decontaminated" after a CBRN shower. One of the stranger experiences of a lifetime! |
Beyond
the very well-run volunteering scheme at UCLH itself, there’s also been some
research into NHS volunteering generally and its impact.
In November 2013, the health charity and think-tank the King’s Fund published
some interesting research on the scope of NHS volunteering in
acute trusts, finding for example that trusts had an average of 471 volunteers,
but that numbers varied and didn’t always bear resemblance to the size of the
trusts. The nursing and HR staff answering the King’s Fund survey reported that
more could be done to measure the impact of volunteers and the King’s Fund
researchers concluded that information would help trusts make better strategic
use of volunteers, but at that time, 87% of respondents did feel the number of
volunteers would increase by 2016. It also found volunteers have been
getting younger and more diverse in recent years.
Perhaps
most interesting of all, King’s Fund also reported that every £1 invested in
volunteering was yielding “around £11 in added value”, suggesting that at a
time of tight budgets in the NHS, somewhat of a “bang for buck” argument can be
made for ensuring volunteering services are retained. And there’s also been
some recognition of the need for greater central support and funding for
volunteering schemes - NESTA and the Cabinet Office collaborated on the Helping in Hospitals initiative, which
provided £1.5m to help six trusts improve the reach, impact and measurement of
their volunteer services. This was encouraging, but I’d like to see more of
this in the future. Phillip Blond of the think-tank ResPublica, a
driving force behind the Conservative government’s Big Society agenda, once
argued for an NHS featuring “a mixture of state and people who give a damn”,
and Labour’s Civil Society spokesperson Lisa Nandy MP has repeatedly noted the
role volunteers have played in the NHS since its inception, but more support
still could strengthen and rationalise the role that we play.
You
can read about UCLH Volunteer Services here or apply to
volunteer. I have written this blog in a personal capacity.
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