Helpforce’s view on evidence in volunteering

Helpforce has been around for just over 4 years - so what have we learned about evidence in health and care volunteering?

When Helpforce started we visited many hospitals across England and met with CEOs who were passionate about the role their volunteers played. However the majority of them admitted that the evidence - the data proving the impact volunteering made on patients, staff, and services - was lacking. Without it, volunteering will always find itself struggling to be funded in an environment where budgets are constantly under pressure.

Early in our journey Helpforce undertook an evidence review which highlighted some spot examples of impact, particularly around the benefits to volunteers. But there was limited evidence of the impact on NHS patients & staff, and almost nothing on the impact of volunteering on hospital services.

To support the national programmes Helpforce has since been involved in, we saw the need to develop our own approach bespoke to health volunteering, that could assist and empower NHS trusts to self-evaluate. This led to the creation of the Insight & Impact toolkit.

Our aim was to shift away from the belief that evaluation was an activity only done at the end of a project by a specialist or academic partner. Instead, it should be done throughout the project and ongoing, by the volunteering management team, as part of continuous service improvement. With the goal to collect data that provides:

• Insights - data that tells us how an intervention could be improved;

• Impact - data to prove what the intervention achieves in terms of outcome measures.

The Insight & Impact toolkit was used most recently on the Volunteering Innovators Programme (link to outputs here), where we collected data over 12 months across 11 NHS trusts. Through evaluations co-designed with the trusts, the relevancy and volume of data collected enabled us to produce an evidence report which proved how impactul volunteering roles benefit patients, staff, and services. A number of trust leaders that reviewed the report told us that the evidence is excellent, and they would be happy to see such findings support a business case brought to their trust board.

Our belief is that volunteering can have a far greater impact in health and care if supported by greater investment at the grassroots level - in hospitals, GPs, communities. If Helpforce can assist the many brilliant volunteer managers across these settings to prove the impact, and help grow and sustain their funding, we can secure a greater role for volunteering in our future health and care.