Chester hospital artist backs ‘Volunteer to Career’ scheme aiding stretched NHS workforce

An artist who moved from a Chester hospital volunteering role into a frontline healthcare career is backing a proven scheme that helped realise her dream – and could be key to easing NHS workforce pressures.

Amy Edisbury-Williams never imagined her skills as an artist could lead to a career in the NHS after her degree in Fine Arts left her unsure of her next steps.

But thanks to the ‘Volunteer to Career’ programme she now combines an NHS job helping patients cope with dementia and Parkinson's disease with a Masters degree in Art Therapy.

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 Cheshire and Wirral Partnership NHS 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 25-year-old Amy, those who’ve moved into the sector include former members of the armed forces community, refugees, over 50s, and single parents.

Amy, who works at Bowmere Hospital in Chester, said: “If it wasn’t for Volunteer to Career, it would have been much harder to find relevant work to support my MA in Art Therapy.”

Amy graduated with a degree in Fine Art from Kingston University, London, in 2020 with no real idea what she wanted to do next. A tutor suggested her style was ‘Outsider Art’ - a term for unconventional art often produced by psychiatric and mental health patients.

“I researched it and realised that my artistic skills could help other people. It could help them express things they couldn’t express any other way. That’s when I became interested in Art Therapy as a career,” said Amy.

Having moved in with family in Chester when Covid 19 hit the UK, Amy applied for a Masters degree in Art Therapy at the University of Chester but didn’t get a place due to lack of practical experience.

That’s when she heard about the Volunteer to Career (VtC) programme that had just launched at Cheshire and Wirral Partnership NHS Foundation Trust. Amy became one of the Trust’s first volunteers as part of a VtC pilot at Bowmere Hospital, working as a Therapeutic Activity Volunteer on the psychiatric ward, helping to deliver art sessions for people in recovery.

Six months later, a paid position came up and Amy landed a job as Occupational Therapy Technical Instructor. Her relevant voluntary experience had also gained her a place at Chester University to study Art Therapy.

Now aged 25 and living with her partner in Shropshire, Amy balances studying for her Masters with her job at Bowmere Hospital. Her current role is on the Acute ward, working with patients suffering from dementia and Parkinson's. Last year she came up with a new initiative that saw patients working with clay, paint, abstract figure drawing and lino printing to host their very own exhibition in the hospital.

She said: “I feel that the Volunteer to Career scheme has enabled me to find my element and I am thriving in it. For me, art is a language through which you can express your feelings, even if you’re not conscious of the feelings you want to express. It is a privilege to enable other people to benefit from art.”

Suzanne Edwards, director of operations, at Cheshire and Wirral Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, said:

“Amy’s story illustrates the incredible value of opening up healthcare career opportunities to people with no prior experience in the field. Since joining our Trust Amy has been a true asset to the team at Bowmere Hospital, taking part in, and introducing, innovative initiatives that have been of tremendous value to our patients. We are delighted to have partnered with Helpforce on an initiative which enables individuals like Amy to pursue a career in healthcare via volunteering.”

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 vacant.

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

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 Amy 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.

It also 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.

Helpforce’s analysis suggests substantial additional benefits for existing NHS staff, patients and local communities:

• 82% of healthcare staff engaged in the national programme 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.”

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.