About the campaign
The Back to Health campaign starts with a simple idea but holds an ambitious goal - to help a million people across the UK recover from the devastating impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, through the support of volunteers.
To achieve this, we are asking health and care organisations to create high-impact volunteering opportunities at scale that can help one million people to get more support in the hospital, community and at home.
"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 CEO
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:
- Keeping patients active and mobile
- Reassurance and practical support
- Preventing falls and reducing readmission
- Helping vulnerable patients to eat and drink
- Speeding up discharge
- Getting people home from hospital
- End of life care
"I know first-hand the benefit volunteers can bring both in freeing up staff time to focus on clinical activity and improving the patient experience."
Ruth May, Chief Nursing Officer, England
How to get involved:
Partnering with Helpforce:
Helpforce is an independent not-for-profit innovator, identified by the NHS Long Term Plan as an agent of change. We already support nearly 50 NHS Trusts with their volunteer roles. We want you to benefit from our expertise, tools and resources.
Email us here to find out how to become our partners.
When partnering with us, we will support you to:
- Increase the impact of your existing volunteering
- Share and embed roles that are succeeding in other places
- Design volunteering roles to tackle your priorities
- Enable you to develop more roles for underrepresented groups
- Help make the persuasive case for increased investment
Details of what support we provide to organisations can be found below:
Develop your volunteering
Visit this section to explore our methodologies that will help you adopt high-impact volunteering roles, access best practice to help you improve your service, and find out how we can help you identify high impact volunteering opportunities. Learn more.
Capture & present impact
Our Insight & Impact service supports the end-to-end process of evaluating volunteering, helping you improve your volunteering service and quantify the health-related benefits to people and services. Learn more.
Connect you with others
Being a volunteering leader can sometimes feel like you are on your own and unable to share your new ideas or challenges with anyone else. That’s why we have created the Helpforce Network, a lively community for professionals like you to connect and support each other, enabling you to collaborate with colleagues and build confidence and resilience into your volunteering operations. Learn more.
Find out how the Helpforce Network helps Back to Health partners here.
Be inspired
Every great idea starts with a spark, and that’s why we have a section full of great examples and heart touching volunteering stories, which showcase the best of British volunteerism to keep you inspired and motivated. Be inspired.
Ready to be involved?
Drop us an email at help@helpforce.community and we can start the conversation today.
Thank you to our supporters and funders
This campaign would not be possible without the support of our funders and supporters. Thank you for believing in us. Together we can help one million people to get back to their full health.
If you would like to become a donor for this important campaign, please contact help@helpforce.community.