General Networking Discussion Group

14 May 2024

Another great discussion between network members but unfortunately no one was able to help with this question. Can you?

There is a communication issue with carers not always being notified when the person they are caring for is being discharged from hospital, so they are unprepared. There is some legislation to say that they should be involved in the exit/discharge process, but in some cases this does not happen.

Does anyone have any ideas or experience on how to get volunteers involved to improve this process?

Please use the reply facility on this Forum if you can help a fellow member.

Recruitment

After being inundated with volunteer applications at the beginning of the year one organisation has found that the numbers have recently dropped dramatically.

Top tips shared

• Join local community groups on Facebook. This will enable you to target specific groups and areas when you have a vacancy to post.
• If your organisation has several premises, make sure that your advertisements for vacancies are placed in all of them.
• Recruitment often happens in waves so don’t be concerned unless it becomes a long-term trend.
• Arrange for any good news stories with a mention of vacancies published in your local magazines and newspapers.

• Getting a mention on your local radio station is great publicity.
• Make contact with other organisations in your locality. It can be useful to know if they are having the same issues with recruitment plus, they may have people come forward to volunteer that are not suitable for their organisation but maybe are for yours and vice versa.
• Use Volunteers’ Week as an opportunity to raise awareness of volunteer opportunities in your organisation.

DBS Checks and sharing volunteers

Top tips shared

• Some have used transferable DBS’s successfully.
• All volunteers can join the update service for free. The volunteers do have to register for this within 30 days of the ‘date of issue’ displayed on their certificate.
• Some volunteers have not completely understood the update service and tried to register after the deadline. It was recommended that the volunteers are given extra information about the service to ensure that there are no misunderstandings.

Reporting

Top tip shared

• Using the monetary value of volunteers in reports to prove their value and impact could help to gain more funding.

Increasing the visibility of volunteers

• “I didn’t realise how many volunteers we had.” This was a comment received recently from staff after volunteers had started wearing new polo shirts.