Volunteers play a critically important and growing role in the NHS. It is important to invest in them, rather than treat volunteering as a cost-cutting option
Three million people – as many as already work in the whole of the NHS and social care – say they volunteer for health, disability and welfare organisations. A report by The King’s Fund, published in March this year, considered the likely impact of the health reforms on volunteering and found a yawning gap in our knowledge about the scale and impact of volunteering in health and social care.
Our new report attempts to start filling in these gaps, by looking at volunteering in acute hospitals. We approached all acute trusts in England; asking for information on the scale, scope and nature of volunteering, how it is organised and funded, and its impact.
Scaling up our findings, there are at least 78,000 regular, committed volunteers contributing over 13 million hours of their time in England’s hospitals. Some hospitals have thousands of volunteers and some very few. Although larger hospitals do tend to have more volunteers, the relationship between size and numbers is not strong and many large hospitals have far fewer volunteers than others of similar size.
Virtually all respondents predicted a significant increase in the numbers of volunteers in their hospitals over time. Trusts will need to understand how volunteers themselves are changing. Our survey shows that whilst volunteers remain predominantly female, they are getting younger and increasingly diverse. They also want different things from the volunteering experience; for example, they may see it as a pathway into work. The stereotype of the elderly white-haired lady pushing the tea trolley is fast becoming just that: a stereotype.
It is clear that volunteering is highly valued by patients. But our survey found that few trusts are formally measuring the impact of volunteers on patient experience and quality of care, or routinely assessing the return on investment of volunteers. Volunteering is not in the DNA of every trust - almost four in ten do not receive reports on volunteering at board level and only half have a volunteering strategy. Trusts need to do more to understand and make the most of the potential of volunteering.
In this respect, funding recently announced by Nesta as part of its ‘Helping in Hospitals’ programme could be a useful resource to demonstrate the impact on patient care.
We estimate that the return on investment is likely to be at least 11 to 1 in terms of the value that volunteers contribute compared to the costs incurred by trusts in volunteer training and development. So the business case for volunteering is a no-brainer, but trusts need to be very clear about their motivations and intentions for investing more in volunteering.
Volunteers provide complementary but different services and care to staff. They are not a substitute. Our March report showed just how important the perception of motivation is to a successful volunteering service. Staff, volunteers and patients all saw volunteering as a way to enhance care, not as a cheaper substitute for paid roles. Any attempt to use volunteers as part of cost control programmes, or even the perception of this, would therefore lead to a lack of trust and goodwill between staff, patients and volunteers.
To be successful, trusts need to be able to develop a more strategic understanding of volunteering. Many trusts are already collecting feedback from current volunteers but it is less clear how this is used to inform improvements and service changes. And there is much additional information which would be useful for them.
This includes what volunteers want and need from the experience, where to draw the line between appropriate staff and volunteer roles and, crucially, the impact volunteers have on patient experience and quality of care. With a more sophisticated approach, all hospitals should be able to maximise the enormous potential that volunteers have to offer. It is time to think big about volunteering.
David Buck is a senior fellow in public health and inequalities at the King's Fund, and a co-author of its new report on volunteering in acute hospitals
