There’s no holding Charlotte back!
9th November 2020
Submitted by Eleanor Morri, Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust
Charlotte Walker joined the Trust to support our Clinical Volunteers programme (set up in March 2020) during the Covid 19 outbreak and pandemic. It was very important at this time that the Trust recruited volunteers quickly due to losing our existing volunteer workforce, in order to support the patients and staff and complement the busy staff teams.
Volunteers were trained to provide bed making, serving refreshments and food hygiene, dementia awareness and patient communication, hand hygiene, infection prevention and use of PPE and information governance. Many kind hearted individuals from our local community applied to volunteer and Charlotte was one of them, starting with us in April 2020.
Charlotte’s school was closed so she had time on her hands, in addition her mother works at the Trust and encouraged her to put her spare time to good use. Charlotte hopes to now go to University to study Geography.
Since commencing with us as a Clinical Volunteer there has been no holding Charlotte back! She quickly settled into a role on our acute stroke ward and renal ward. We are very appreciative of the support she has provided.
One of the services managers told us that Charlotte is an excellent volunteer who has been instrumental in rolling out Facetime and Zoom calls with patients and their families as visiting is restricted. She is always reliable, caring, happy to help and always willing to go the ‘extra mile’. She has settled in very well to the ward C21 and C25 team. She turns up on the ward motivated and ready to support patients and staff. She has helped with various projects and been able to provide an enhanced level of support to patients that staff aren’t always able to provide. Our vision is to continually strive to improve the outcomes and experiences for the communities that we serve and we really believe that Charlotte has contributed to this particularly with Facetime calls at a time when patients are unable to see loved ones face to face.
Our values are to be Kind and Caring, Exceed Expectation and be Safe and effective and Charlotte has demonstrated all three with the fantastic contribution she has made. Since she started volunteering with us in April 2020, Charlotte has contributed an amazing 96 hours of volunteering, which is truly astounding, not missing attendance during this time.
We have really enjoyed having Charlotte with us for this time during her school closure, she made an enormous difference to patient’s experience and also with relieving clinical staff pressure. We wish Charlotte well at university, and in all she does in the future. We feel she is truly deserving of recognition.
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