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
449,283
patients and service users
111,472
health and care staff
63,019
volunteers
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.
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, 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.
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