Our Back to Health campaign


Our Back to Health campaign was launched in March 2022 with a simple idea and an ambitious goal - to help one million people across the UK to wait well, get well, recover well, and live well, through the support of volunteers.
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To achieve our goal, we have encouraged and supported health and care organisations to create high-impact volunteering opportunities at scale that will help one million people to get more support in hospital, and in their community and at home.

We’re firmly on track to achieve our ambitious strategic target by March 2025. 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.

The Back to Health framework for establishing volunteering services across the NHS and community continues to shape our approach to working with our partners, such as the brilliant Back to Health Pathway at George Eliot NHS Hospital Trust.

Through our Back to Health campaign, we have so far supported

676,296

patients and service users

113,554

health and care staff

65,558

volunteers
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Why Back to Health?

The Covid-19 pandemic shone a spotlight on the power and potential of volunteers in health and care. Millions of people provided vital support to people shielding and to help with the national vaccination rollout.

We now face another crisis. Health and care staff and services are being stretched to breaking point, with increasing demand and significant workforce shortages.

The Helpforce Back to Health campaign is here to ensure volunteers become a key part of the solution.

Back to Health framework
Back to Health framework

How volunteers can help

Alongside brilliant professional staff, volunteers help to make care more effective – or even reduce the need for treatment in the first place:

Waiting well:

  • Providing reassurance and practical support for people waiting for diagnosis or treatment
  • Ensuring people can attend their appointments and get their diagnosis or into treatment as soon as possible

Getting well:

  • Supporting vulnerable people to eat and drink
  • Providing companionship
  • Encouraging people to improve their mobility

Recovering well:

  • Helping people settle back home, and avoid unnecessary readmissions to hospital
  • Supporting patients with prescribed physiotherapy exercises

Living well:

  • Providing further support, including signposting people to local community services

Through this campaign, we want to start a national conversation to raise awareness of the huge impact of volunteering on our health and care system and to encourage more organisations to look at volunteers as an integral part of their health and care pathway.

Mark Lever Headshot

Mark Lever, Helpforce Chief Executive

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.

Our current projects

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

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.

Contact us

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

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