How we get the Response Volunteer Programme up and running in just a few months

This blog was written by Jenny Oboy, Voluntary Services Coordinator for East and North Herts NHS Trust

I am the Senior Voluntary Services Coordinator for East and North Herts NHS Trust, my manager is Claire Lyon, and the Patient Experience Project Coordinator is Jane Shaw, and together we make up the Voluntary Services Team.

In 2020, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, we in Voluntary Services were bowled over with the amount of offers of help we received from people from all walks of life, who wanted to assist the NHS in any way they could during this national crisis.

Up until that point we had been running a successful Voluntary Service with just over 400 volunteers, doing a range of tasks from patient-facing roles helping staff on wards, to music or Pets as Therapy volunteers and admin roles. When the pandemic reached Hertfordshire, we temporarily suspended all usual volunteer roles while we assessed the needs of the hospital, how we could best deploy our non-vulnerable current volunteers safely, and streamline the recruitment service for new volunteers coming forwards.

We have a good working relationship with our wonderful colleagues in the Voluntary Services department at West Herts NHS Trust who had set up a Response Volunteer programme at Watford Hospital to provide volunteers on an ad hoc basis to any department or team who requested them (read more here). We reached out to them to ask for help in setting up this programme for East and North Herts and their advice and support has been invaluable! We wanted to create a more flexible and responsive support service for the staff as the pandemic was a completely new and unpredictable situation to deal with.

On 17^th August 2020 we officially began our Response Volunteer programme! We completely reshaped our volunteering model from recruiting long term volunteers and placing them with departments who had requested them and assumed responsibility for them, to recruiting and managing non-vulnerable volunteers ourselves, which meant being a lot more hands on. We triage the tasks from staff around the hospital (either via email or phone) before sending or taking volunteers to them from 8am-3:30pm each day. We have three shifts a day between Monday and Friday, and each volunteer reports to our office to store any personal belongings before being told where to go. The maximum number of volunteers we have had on a shift is six at one time! We have a rota from which volunteers can select shifts week by week, as we have found that at the moment, with everyone doing a combination of online learning, working from home, or even being furloughed, the flexibility is really appreciated, rather than having to commit to a fixed shift each week.

One of the challenges at the beginning was promoting the service around the hospital and embedding the Response Volunteers and the tasks they could do into the thinking of each ward and department; we had volunteers distribute flyers with how they could help and introduce themselves to as many wards and departments as possible on a shift. Slowly we started to get more requests come through, and our volunteers became very busy, going all over the hospital! They deliver letters to patients, sent through the Trust website from loved ones unable to visit at the moment; they help with marshalling and social distancing of queues for Pathology and the Vaccine Hub; they restock PPE and hand gel around the hospital; they have delivered toys donated through Charity to Paediatrics; they have also facilitated a lot of Virtual Visits (video calls) between patients and their loved ones. The range of tasks they are given keeps them very busy!

We will definitely continue the Response Volunteer programme after the pandemic, as they all love the variety of tasks and the exposure to all the different facets of the hospital. It is great experience for our younger volunteers who will go on to study Healthcare or Medicine, and gives them a huge amount of confidence and life experience. We also love being so connected to our volunteers and hearing their feedback on a day-to-day basis. We have 52 registered Response Volunteers and we are currently looking at how we can expand the service to include evening and weekend support, and we want to recruit even more volunteers who bring their amazing range of skills and life experience to the Trust.

If you are looking into developing the Response Volunteer Model, you can look at the Active Response Model - Volunteering Service Guide for more information.