Military wife backs ‘Volunteer to Career’ scheme aiding stretched NHS workforce

A military wife who moved from a 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.

Angie Duffin never imagined she could become a Medical Laboratory Assistant at a busy hospital after spending much of her life uprooting her family of four children to follow her army husband around the world to his latest posting. But thanks to the ‘Volunteer to Career’ programme she now spends her days working as a lab assistant in Pathology.

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 Gloucestershire Hospitals 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 49-year-old Angie, those who’ve moved into the sector include former fellow members of the armed forces community, refugees, over 50s, and single parents.

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.

And it comes after Helpforce recently launched a Volunteer to Career programme specifically designed for the armed forces community – currently running in 11 NHS Trusts, with a view to further expansion.

Angie Duffin, from Barnwood, Gloucester, said: “If it wasn’t for Volunteer to Career, I wouldn’t be working in the NHS, and certainly not in Pathology - I just wouldn’t have seen it as a career path that was open to me.”

Originally from South Africa, Angie came to Britain in 2001 and was in her twenties when she fell in love with ‘squaddie’ Tim after a flirtation in a kebab shop.

Fast forward a few years and with four children to bring up, Angie’s life became a balancing act between being a mum, following Royal Engineer Tim round the globe and juggling work as a healthcare assistant in private nursing homes.

Angie said: “Life as a military wife is challenging. Your husband is away much of the time so for many women it is like being a single mum – you have to manage everything on your own. It can be lonely and isolating. The divorce rate in the armed forces is high.”

But when Tim left the army after 24 years of service and the couple settled permanently in Gloucester, Angie was able to focus on her lifelong dream of working for the NHS. She began volunteering one day a week in the Emergency Department of Gloucestershire Royal Hospital, and through that found out about the tailored programme offered by Volunteer To Career.

In January 2025 Angie was accepted onto a pilot VTC programme in Pathology, an area she had become increasingly interested in. The scheme allowed her to rotate around the different labs and find out about the work of the department. She felt she had found her niche and when a job came up in the Pre-analytical lab, she applied and got it.

Angie said: “I can’t tell you the impact the Volunteer To Career programme has had on my life. It’s been a really big deal for me, it has been life changing. I’ll be 50 this year and have spent the last 20 years as a healthcare assistant and military wife. This feels like a whole new chapter.”

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 Angie 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 additionally 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.

Katherine Holland, Head of Patient Experience at Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said: “As Angie Duffin’s story shows, Volunteer to Career is a powerful way to open healthcare career opportunities to individuals without prior experience. It also serves as a valuable pathway into employment or further education that might otherwise be difficult to access. We’re proud to have partnered with Helpforce on this initiative, which has created fantastic new opportunities for both our local community and our organisation.”

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

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

• Each 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.”

For more information on Helpforce’s Volunteer to Career programme specifically designed for members of the armed forces community, visit here

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

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.