Bradford mum backs ‘Volunteer to Career’ scheme aiding stretched NHS workforce

A Bradford mum-of-two who has moved from a hospital volunteering role towards a frontline healthcare career is backing a scheme that has helped realise her dream – and could be key to easing NHS workforce pressures.

Mahmuda Khanum never imagined she could land a job in the NHS after spending years working for a debt collection company, but thanks to a unique ‘Volunteer to Career’ programme she is now close to becoming a dietician.

The initiative, piloted by national charity Helpforce, is designed to harness the power of volunteering in tackling persistent recruitment issues across health services.

It gives people who are interested in healthcare careers but don’t have a background in the field a chance to gain valuable experience and build confidence before applying for paid roles or training.

To date, 48 different NHS organisations across England, including Bradford District Care Foundation Trust, have taken part in Volunteer to Career – enabling individuals from all walks of life to secure permanent jobs including healthcare assistants, mental health support workers and assistant physiotherapists.

Alongside 35-year-old Mahmuda, those who’ve moved into the sector include former members of the armed forces community, refugees, and individuals who’ve been long-term unemployed.

Now leading health voices are calling for further investment to “supersize” Volunteer to Career, with Helpforce suggesting it has potential to cost-effectively fill around 23,600 frontline healthcare job vacancies and related study placements in England by the end of the current Parliament. As of now, around 107,000 NHS secondary care roles in England are vacanti.

The call has the backing of two influential health think-tanks - The Health Foundation and The King’s Fund - as well as NHS Providers.

Mahmuda Khanum, from Manningham, said: “If it wasn’t for Volunteer to Career, I wouldn’t be anywhere close to working in healthcare – I just wouldn’t have seen it as a career path that was open to me.”

At the age of 14, Mahmuda’s parents took her out of school in Bradford and moved her to Bangladesh for four years – an action that was the cultural norm in the South Asian community in the early 2000s, as Mahmuda explains: “It was just the done thing with daughters. Parents would worry about the kind of exposure that their daughters would have in the UK in their teenage years, so it was acceptable practice to send them to Bangladesh for a few years. The main roles mapped out for South Asian girls when I was growing up was not education-based, so removing them from school wasn’t seen as a problem.” 

While in Bangladesh, Mahmuda studied Islamic Studies and Languages But when she returned to the UK when she was 18 and started looking for work, she found herself at a disadvantage. “Having been removed from school, I didn’t have any GCSEs. It made it really hard for me as whenever I applied for a job they asked about qualifications – it limited my choices,” recalled Mahmuda. 

“Eventually I managed to secure a role working in the financial department of a debt collection company, but it was more a case of ‘needs must’ than anything else,” recalled Mahmuda.

After getting married, Mahmuda had a daughter in 2013, and a son in 2019. It was after her son’s birth that Mahmuda decided to take night classes and study for the GCSEs she’d missed out on in her earlier life. 

At around the same time, Mahmuda developed an interest in healthcare and that’s when she stumbled across Helpforce’s Volunteer to Career programme. 

“I wanted to do something that helped other people, but I wasn’t sure whether healthcare would suit me. So, I enquired about volunteering at Bradford Hospital and that’s when I learned about Helpforce’s Volunteer to Career initiative. It sounded like a great way to get a taste of what working in health would be like, so I signed up to do a couple of hours a week. 

“I was given a volunteer role at a baby clinic – it happened to be at the end of my road, so it was handy. My main role involving weighing and measuring babies from newborns onwards and interacting with their mothers. 

“I loved it. The nurses I was supporting were really encouraging and they helped to develop my confidence. I really fitted in and felt like part of the team,” said Mahmuda.

Mahmuda noticed that the work involved occasional referrals to dietetic services, for babies who weren’t putting on sufficient weight – often due to underlying conditions. She found this area fascinating and, after completing a Level 3 access course at full-time college – equivalent to A Levels – she applied to undertake a degree in dietetics and was accepted by Leeds Beckett University where she’s currently in her final year and on a placement at Leeds Children’s Hospital. When she graduates, she has her eyes set on a permanent paediatric dietician role.

Helpforce Chief Executive, Amerjit Chohan, said:

“The success of the Volunteer to Career programme to date has been significant. Together with our partners in NHS Trusts and other organisations, we’ve helped people like Mahmuda to gain valuable experience before applying for paid roles.

“Through expertly designed and structured pathways, volunteers can find their niche without the immediate pressure of employment, while being upskilled and given confidence to take into job interviews.

“Since we launched the pilot initiative in 2022, hundreds of people have taken part nationally, with 55% of them successfully transitioning from volunteering roles to paid careers in healthcare or associated courses - including nursing and midwifery.

“Our analysis shows that with the right investment, there’s clear potential to supersize the opportunity, with conservative capacity for each of the 215 NHS trusts in England to support an average of 50 volunteers annually. We believe that over the next four years that could set over 23,650 people on a path to fulfilling healthcare careers that benefit not only them, but the whole of society. We urge the Government to consider Volunteer to Career expansion as part of its upcoming NHS 10-Year Health Plan, unleashing the potential of home-grown healthcare talent.”

Not only does the Volunteer to Career programme help tackle acute frontline NHS workforce issues, it also addresses the challenge of encouraging people who aren’t in jobs - either through choice or circumstance - to re-enter the workforce, with an estimated 9.3 million people aged 16-64 in the UK deemed economically inactiveii.

And it supports a key objective of the NHS Long-Term Workforce Plan: to train more NHS staff domestically, reducing reliance on international recruitment and agency staff - with an ambition that in 15 years’ time around10.5% of the NHS workforce will be recruited from overseas, compared to nearly a quarter nowiii.

Catherine Jowitt, Head of Charity and Volunteering at Bradford District Care NHS Foundation Trust, said:

“As Mahmuda’s story illustrates, Volunteer to Career is an effective way of opening up healthcare career opportunities to people with no prior experience in the field. We are delighted to have partnered with Helpforce on the initiative.”

Helpforce’s analysis suggests that Volunteer to Career brings substantial benefits for existing NHS staff, patients and local communities:

• 82% of healthcare staff engaged in the programme nationally said volunteers improved their working lives, while 90% reported that working alongside volunteers improved the quality of service they could provide.

• Eeach volunteer supported an average of 190 people.

• 42% of volunteers were from ethnic minority backgrounds and 61% lived in areas ranking within the 50% most deprived – illustrating the programme’s effectiveness at drawing-in diverse talent from local communities.

Sarah Woolnough, chief executive of the King’s Fund, said:

At a time when the NHS is severely stretched and tackling long-standing and chronic workforce shortages, Helpforce is doing excellent, innovative work to support volunteers to explore opportunities for an NHS career. To implement Volunteer to Career on a mass scale would require strategic investment in volunteer managers across NHS Trusts, but such investment would likely be cost-effective when set against paying high fees to agencies that supply temporary staff and helping to reduce the health services’ reliance on recruiting large numbers of healthcare staff from overseas."

Dr Jennifer Dixon DBE, Chief Executive of the Health Foundation, said:

“The results from Helpforce’s far-reaching pilot are significant. Scaling-up Volunteer to Career has to be worthy of serious consideration by a government that’s eager to get people back to work, help with long-standing NHS workforce problems and boost social capital in local communities.”

Saffron Cordery, Interim Chief Executive of NHS Providers, said:

“It’s evident that a great many NHS Trusts are already reaping benefits from the Volunteer to Career programme. Addressing NHS workforce shortages requires a readiness to explore innovative solutions and bold thinking. The advantage of expanding an already proven model like this is that good practice can easily be shared to deliver results at scale.”

As well as working with NHS hospital and ambulance trusts, the Volunteer to Career pilot has involved nine hospices.

Learn more about why volunteering should be included in the NHS 10 Year Plan.

Learn more about Volunteer to Career.

Read more stories from Volunteer to Career.

For further information, please contact:

Martin McGlown, Head of Communications at Helpforce, on 07737 722643 MM@helpforce.community; or Vy Tran, Helpforce Communications and Content Manager, on 07508 772844 vt@helpforce.community

Notes to Editors:

Helpforce is the only independent UK charity focused exclusively on establishing high impact volunteering services across the health system.

Its team of experts:

• Co-create innovative solutions with health and care organisations.

• Enable organisations to maximise the potential of volunteering to improve outcomes for people and services.

• Connect the people leading volunteers to improve quality together.

Founded in 2017, the charity works with NHS trusts, hospices, local authorities, and voluntary and community organisations – directly and indirectly supporting hundreds of thousands of people.

Helpforce was recently awarded a GSK IMPACT Award, a prestigious national health award for small and medium sized charities delivered in partnership with The King’s Fund, in recognition of programmes including Volunteer to Career.