What will 2021 hold for volunteering in health and care?
16th March 2021
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This blog was written by Vy Tran, Knowledge and Content Manager at Helpforce
The start of 2021 sees the country plunge into another deeper crisis as we face the third lockdown. The new and more contagious strain of Covid is spreading rapidly across the country, which leads to a huge increase in hospital admissions, adding pressure onto the NHS, social care and public health. Clearly, volunteering is needed now more than ever, not only in helping the Government to roll out the mass vaccination programme, but also supporting the shielded and vulnerable people, patients and staff throughout this challenging time. It could be difficult to look beyond January and February, but what might the rest of this year hold for volunteering in health and care?
1 - Local collaboration is expected to become increasingly popular
If there was one positive thing about 2020 which is likely to continue in 2021, it would be local collaboration.
There was clear evidence that local authorities, local voluntaries and charitable organisations, as well as informal volunteers, such as mutual aid groups, were better able to meet the needs of their local population, as they could quickly identify who needed help and who could quickly support those individuals. In fact, they were so good that there were not enough tasks to share with volunteers who were recruited from national campaigns. In addition, researchers identified that national volunteer platforms often have problems with over-recruiting of volunteers, a lack of communication/data sharing between those who hold volunteering information and the local authorities and volunteering and charity organisations who might need to access them; and finally a failure in linking with local infrastructures (MoVe research, 2020). It absolutely makes sense that local organisations are the best players to meet the needs of their local communities and that also reflects in the NHS Long Term Plan, which this year aims to introduce more integrated care systems where all healthcare providers, commissioners, local authorities and local partners are brought together to collectively plan and integrate care to meet the needs of their populations.
Already, we have seen local health providers integrate volunteering into their work. Currently, Helpforce is supporting GP practices to liaise with local charities in West London to run the Helpforce Companions pilot scheme, where companion volunteers can support patients in different ways, such as accompanying them to the clinic, hospital appointments, or simply for taking them out for a walk. Similar volunteering initiatives at general practices are also happening in Lancashire, Gloucestershire and North West London. As we are running the Integrated Approaches to Volunteering project with the funding from NHS England and Improvement, we are aiming to support integrated care systems (ICSs) to find funding for their volunteering projects, help them connect with each other, and finally to explore volunteer portability to enable them to support their community more easily.
2 - Response volunteer model and remote volunteering will continue to be the top choice for NHS hospitals
Last year we saw a number of NHS Trusts that were able to mobilise volunteers effectively to reduce pressures for staff and enhance patient experience through the use of active response volunteers. For example, at Barts Health NHS Trust, the active response volunteers were successful in delivering 60,000 meals to staff, returning 200 belonging items to next of kin, dropping off 1,667 belonging items from visitors to wards, and supporting the Staff Health Wellbeing Hub to ensure staff were well looked after during the challenging times.
This model allows volunteers to respond quickly to demands of patients and staff as well as to be part of the Trusts’ recovery plans. In our report “Impactful volunteering roles in hospitals”, we found that 72 per cent of staff strongly agreed that response volunteers help them to feel less stressed.
With the rapid change in demand expected to happen in the next few months, we believe that the volunteer response model will still be one of the top choices for many hospitals to implement.
Due to the lockdown restrictions, many outpatient clinics will not allow patients to visit hospitals and therefore it is expected that the remote volunteering roles will continue, such as telephone/befriending roles or online social support groups.
At Helpforce, we are pleased to partner with a number of hospitals in the UK to build up their response volunteering models, so that they can recruit volunteers and get them on board quickly and safely. If you think your NHS Trust can benefit from this model, please get in touch at help@helpforce.community.
3 - Volunteers will need more support to cope with the knock-out effect of Covid-19
From our research with representatives from different integrated care systems last November, it emerged that volunteers experienced low mood or exhaustion from supporting people with mental health issues during the pandemic. The participants reported that the emotional impacts ranged from low mood to upset. The key challenge was the complexity of some people they were supporting, and some of the support structures weren’t in place. There’s a gap between what a volunteer can do to support someone and the threshold they get for a public sector intervention. This trend is expected to continue this year and therefore, it is utterly important for volunteer services to provide more health and wellbeing support to their volunteers.
Conclusion:
The year of 2021 is not going to be any easier than 2020. With the logistic challenges posed by the roll-out of the national vaccination programme, the increased backlog of treatment where it has reached 4.1 million patients, and stressed and exhausted NHS staff, it is still going to be a challenging year for our health and care system.
But through partnership and collaboration, the volunteering services in health and care can make a huge impact on our populations’ health and wellbeing through the help of volunteers.
And that’s why for 2021, we aim to partner with more NHS Trusts and Integrated Care Systems, so that we can share with them our knowledge and experience and provide them with an opportunity to connect with each other through the Helpforce Network, helping them to accelerate the growth and impact of volunteering in health and care.
If you would like to collaborate with us to develop new volunteering interventions in acute or community settings, please get in touch at help@helpforce.community. We would love to hear from you.
You may also be interested in:
RVS Report: Volunteering, Covid and Integrated Care Challenges and Opportunities
The Future of Integrated Care in England
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