Liverpool student nurse backs ‘Volunteer To Career’ scheme

A Liverpool woman who moved from a hospital volunteering role into training for a nursing career is backing a proven scheme that helped realise her dream.

Amy Bloxsome spent much of her childhood visiting Alder Hey Children’s Hospital with her elder brother Jordan, who was a Type 1 diabetic. The experience had a huge impact on young Amy and thanks to the ‘Volunteer to Career’ programme she is now training to be a paediatric nurse helping youngsters like her brother.

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 Alder Hey Children’s 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 21-year-old Amy, 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.

Amy Bloxsome, from West Derby, said: “If it wasn’t for Volunteer to Career, I wouldn’t be training to be a nurse – it has helped me every step of the way to achieving my ambition of working at Alder Hey to help young people like my brother.”

Fresh from school,16-year-old Amy applied for Helpforce’s Volunteer To Career programme at Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust, which she heard about through her mum Pauline, a regular volunteer at the hospital. The experience complemented her studies at Hugh Baird College where she was studying for a Level 3 Health and Social Care certificate.

Amy volunteered in A&E, helping patients navigate their appointments, looking after the families and generally taking pressure off the frontline staff. Volunteer To Career also gave her the opportunity to work on the general paediatric ward and learn more about nursing.

“I learnt so much through my volunteering and I loved working at the hospital that helped my brother so much. I was working with other volunteers on rotation so it really built our teamwork and communication skills,” said Amy.

When Amy finished her Level 3 in 2022 a job came up as a healthcare assistant on the children’s ward and she was perfectly placed to secure it. Working full time on the ward convinced Amy that nursing was where her future lay and in January 2023 she began a nursing degree at Edge Hill University in Ormskirk. She is due to qualify as a paediatric nurse in November this year.

Amy said: “I think Volunteer To Career not only helped me work out what I wanted to do in life, but it helped me build my skills, helped me get a job, and helped me onto my nursing degree. My ambition now is to get a job at Alder Hey after I’ve qualified – it will mean everything to me to give back something to the hospital that cared for my brother.”

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.

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.

Anne Doyle, Volunteer Manager at Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust, said:

“As Amy Bloxome’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 delivers substantial 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.”

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.