Our Back to Health campaign

Our three-year Back to Health campaign was launched in March 2022 with a simple idea and an ambitious goal - to help people across the UK to wait well, get well, recover well, and live well.

In achieving our goal, we have exceeded the milestone of 'one million people reached' through supporting healthcare organisations to create high-impact volunteering opportunities at scale that will help individuals to get more support in hospital, in their community, and at home.

Across organisations – including some of the UK’s biggest NHS trusts – volunteers have undertaken a range of duties including helping people to attend hospital appointments, assisting vulnerable patients to eat and drink, encouraging individuals to improve their mobility, and supporting those in recovery with prescribed physiotherapy exercises.

We are very grateful to all our partners and to the campaign funders: Oak Foundation, Burdett Trust for Nursing, John Armitage Charitable Trust, Garfield Weston Foundation and Peacock Charitable Trust.

Read the press release here

Through our Back to Health campaign, we supported

910,954

patients and service users

130,850

health and care staff

77,677

volunteers

The results speak loudly and clearly - Volunteers can deliver impact on a massive scale

87%

of staff agreed or strongly agreed volunteer support improves the quality of care they are able to provide

92%

of patients agreed that volunteers improved their sense of wellbeing

84%

of patients agreed or strongly agreed the volunteer helped them to feel less anxious, aiding their recovery

Back to Health's full impact report is now available

Click here to access the report

Healthcare leaders' endorsements for 'Back to Health'

"Having an established volunteering team means that volunteers are able to anticipate clinicians’ and patients’ needs and know how they can help the department run smoothly. Our clinicians understand, trust, and appreciate the volunteers’ role. I’m proud to champion volunteering services – not as a ‘nice to have’, but as an integral part of modern healthcare delivery.

“Helpforce is doing excellent work to help the NHS and community partners grow and nurture their own volunteering programmes and increase the influence these have within organisations."

Glen Burley, Chief Executive of the Foundation Group collaborative

"At a time when the NHS is severely stretched and tackling chronic workforce shortages, Helpforce’s tailored and innovative work plays a pivotal role in the delivery of patient care across the country. By not just setting up volunteering schemes, but ensuring health and care organisations have the skills and capacity they need to sustain them, they have a lasting impact on each organisation they work with."

Lisa Weaks, Senior Associate at The King’s Fund

"The scale and reach of ‘Back to Health’ has been hugely impressive and it illustrates the phenomenal appetite for healthcare volunteering that exists among the general public. Expertly designed volunteering programmes can have a hugely positive impact on the NHS workforce in terms of freeing up staff to focus on the vital clinical interventions that they are trained to perform."

Professor Clare Cable, Chief Executive of the Burdett Trust for Nursing

You might be interested in

Our Back to Health framework

The Back to Health framework guides how we work with our partners to establish volunteering services.

Learn how this framework works

Our current projects

We are currently working with partners on over 100 projects, developing and evaluating a wide range of volunteering services.

Take a look at our current projects

About us

Volunteers are doing great things across health and care, in the NHS and in our communities – but volunteering is still not making the impact it could for patients, staff and on wider systems.

Helpforce exists to make this happen. Here we explain how.

Learn more about us

Contact us

If you’d like to know more about us or want to work with us

Get in touch

We will be launching a new campaign to build on the legacy of 'Back to Health'– sign up to our monthly newsletter to stay updated