Farewell from Mark Lever, Helpforce CEO
6th December 2024
At the end of December, I will step down from my role as Helpforce Chief Executive, after five and a half fantastic years with the charity, and over 30 years since I made the move from finance into the voluntary sector. Once I’ve retired from paid work, alongside being able to spend more time with my family and on my own voluntary roles, I plan to find time to write something reflecting on my experience leading charities over those 30 years. All the brilliant changes the sector has delivered, and the injustices and poor practice that have stubbornly remained the same, despite many charities’ best endeavours.
But that’s for the future. What I want to do here, is set out some of the key changes I have observed around health and care volunteering since I joined Helpforce in 2019. I’m proud that the great team at Helpforce has always been part of these changes and, working with our many important partners, has often played a key role in making them happen.
There’s a world beyond the hospital car park
The pandemic changed so much for health and care organisations. In particular it meant they had to look beyond their usual systems and staff, and mobilise individuals and organisations from the community to provide essential support.
We need to keep building on that understanding, and support the NHS’s capacity to engage effectively with local voluntary and community organisations and to create volunteering opportunities that can be flexible, informal and/or virtual.
A volunteer from Bradford District Care NHS FT leading a walking group for people in Bradford
It’s no longer all about the numbers
Although it still happens, we’ve moved away from the obsession with volunteer numbers and the hours they contribute. The conversation now is much more about the impact those volunteers deliver, the difference they make to people they support in the community, the NHS, to staff and to themselves.
This is such an important shift, and why Helpforce has prioritised evaluation; helping our partners measure the impact of volunteering services, ensuring they deliver on their objectives, and building a growing bank of robust data about health and care volunteering.
A volunteer at Bradford District Care NHS FT providing counselling support to a service user
Being comfortable making the case for volunteering
This evidence of impact is becoming vital when we are helping our partners to make a business case for volunteering. The very notion of using the language of business cases five years ago was quite alien. I am pleased to say it is now quite commonplace and I am regularly invited to conferences to talk about it. Often with Helpforce’s help, organisations setting up or growing volunteering services are much more likely to understand that they must and can make a robust case for investment in their volunteering infrastructure.
Good volunteering services require investment and organisational buy in
I am pleased to say that I don’t think anyone continues to really believe that volunteering comes for free. However, as well as investment in the infrastructure to develop and run services, there’s a growing recognition that effective services need senior buy-in and, ideally, to be integrated in wider operational and strategic planning.
The importance of good service design and integration
It is clear to me that many health and care leaders now recognise that volunteers can support the whole patient journey. For these volunteering services to be effective they need to be agile and well-designed, and not isolated, ad hoc or stuck in the past.
Our partners making the involving volunteers effectively understand that those services have to be properly designed and developed, if they’re to integrate with wider health or care services. That means good role descriptions, the right training and support, clear governance and effective stakeholder engagement. I’m immensely proud that our programme managers have worked with over 85 organisations to help make this happen and that the Network plays such an important role sharing good practice.
A volunteer at George Eliot Hospital calling patients to remind them of their upcoming appointment
Not replacing staff, but working alongside them
Careful design and integration also means staff understand volunteers’ role and can recognise how this allows them to focus on their own professional or clinical role. We have extensive evidence from research with hundreds of staff, with 87% saying volunteers improve the quality of care they can provide. And we’ve evidence that staff who would ‘recommend their organisation as a place to work’ increases markedly when they work alongside volunteers on a Volunteer to Career pathway, from 73% to 86%. Staff work better and more happily alongside volunteers.
A pathway to a career in health and care
In terms of the many, positive shifts I’ve seen, I’ll conclude with Volunteer to Career. Five and a half years ago, not many people would have seen volunteering as an established, planned route into a potential career. We’ve seen remarkable results, with 72% of over 500 participants going on to employment or training – all while delivering support to patients and staff. Now Volunteer to Career is there, it seems so obvious. It’s a service that organisations can instantly understand, and it continues to grow, with a Volunteer to Career programme targeting veterans and their families due to come on stream in the new year.
Supporting staff at Kingston Hospital
But what next?
Our ‘Unlocking the power of volunteering’ event and report (see photo below) showed how many great and proven volunteering services exist already – and what else still needs to change.
The partners we highlighted in the report and who came to the event are just some of the organisations who are already optimising the role of volunteers - running and growing fantastic volunteering services. But how can we reach out to those organisations that aren’t, and encourage them to start on that journey?
Connected to this, must be proper investment in volunteering and the voluntary sector. We’ve got better at making the business case for volunteering, but right now the money often simply isn’t there. A relatively small investment, could bring significant benefits, potentially tapping into the millions of volunteers in our communities who could help people stay well or support them during and after treatment.
As we recommend in our report, the NHS can immediately work to integrate volunteering better into their service planning and delivery, and the voluntary sector can make sure they are able to demonstrate impact so funders have the confidence to invest. For the longer term, it’s vital that volunteering is fully recognised in the NHS Ten Year Plan for Health.
So plenty for Helpforce still to do as I hand over to a brilliant new Chief Executive, Amerjit Chohan. With the continued support of our remarkable partners and a great team, I am sure they will achieve even more change over the next five years.
Distinguished guests at Helpforce's reception at the House of Commons