Southampton medical student backs ‘Volunteer To Career’ scheme aiding stretched NHS workforce

A Southampton student who was inspired by a hospital volunteering role to pursue a career in eye surgery is backing a proven scheme that put him on a path to achieving his dream – and could be key to easing NHS workforce pressures.

Raahat Shah started out studying pharmaceutical chemistry, but accompanying his grandad to an eye hospital appointment changed his life, sparking a fascination with ophthalmology.

Thanks to a pilot ‘Volunteer to Career’ programme in the NHS, he is now undertaking medical training at the University of Southampton with the ambition of becoming an eye surgeon.

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 confidence before applying for paid roles or training.

To date, 48 different NHS organisations across England 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 22-year-old Raahat, 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 insisting 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. Currently, 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

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

Raahat was a Pharmaceutical Chemistry undergraduate at Queen Mary University of London when an appointment at Moorfields Eye Hospital with his grandfather gave him a life-changing opportunity.

Sitting through his grandad’s eye examinations and watching the staff at work gave Raahat such a buzz of excitement that he immediately knew he wanted to be part of the clinical world. He got chatting to the busy hospital volunteers and discovered the Volunteer to Career programme.

“There was just something about the hospital environment and especially ophthalmology that really appealed to me. No one in my family had been a medic and it seemed like a closed world to me – I had no idea how someone from my background could get into it. But I saw an opportunity here and I grabbed it with both hands,” said Raahat.

Through Helpforce’s Volunteer to Career scheme - operated alongside Friends of Moorfields’ volunteer service, Raahat volunteered once a week at Moorfields for a year. As well as helping the patients and doing administrative work there was plenty of opportunity to witness highly qualified staff at work and experience the clinical setting. The highlight for Raahat was a chance to observe cataract eye surgery – it was a lightbulb moment.

“It was amazing. I knew there and then that I wanted to be an eye surgeon. Volunteering in a specialist eye hospital gave me a real insight into that field of medicine. It convinced me that a career in medicine was what I wanted, and ultimately a career in ophthalmology.”

After finishing his first degree, Raahat is now in his second year of accelerated graduate medical training at the University of Southampton and is currently on a surgical placement at Basingstoke and North Hampshire Hospital.

He added: “A high proportion of students on my course are from medical families. If you’re not from a family with medical connections it can be difficult to find a way to get the right experience. That’s what the VTC scheme did for me – it was a springboard into a medical career.”

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 Raahat 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 Helpforce’s Volunteer to Career programme help tackle acute frontline healthcare 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.

Angela Smith, Chief Executive at Friends of Moorfields Eye Hospital, said:

“We are delighted to have partnered with Helpforce on this initiative, and we’re so proud of Raahat. As his story illustrates, Volunteer to Career is an effective way of opening up healthcare career opportunities to people with no prior experience in the field. To date, 67 of our volunteers have taken part or are currently taking part, and many of them have found fulfilling roles in the NHS, or embarked on further education and training related to health and care.”

Helpforce’s analysis of Volunteer to Career suggests significant additional 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.

• 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.”

As well as working with NHS hospital and ambulance trusts, the Volunteer to Career pilot has involved nine hospices. Funding to date has included a £900,000 grant from NHS England and £865,000 from the Burdett Trust for Nursing.

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.