Volunteering’s impact on NHS staff: our submission to the 10-Year Health Plan
18th February 2025
NHS staff are under pressure and Helpforce and our partners know that volunteers can make a difference. Find out what we’ve proposed to the working group considering how the NHS’s 10-Year Plan can develop the healthcare workforce the system needs.
Consultation around the 10-Year Health Plan is in full flow. Helpforce is seizing this vital opportunity to make sure volunteering is embedded in the Plan, helping to meet the NHS’s many challenges.
Building on the momentum of our ‘Unlocking the power of volunteering’ report and reception, we have proposed how volunteers can support and even help build the NHS workforce to the Plan’s ‘People’ working group. The group is considering how the NHS should recruit, train and retain a workforce to meet the future needs of the healthcare system.
Amerjit Chohan, Helpforce Chief Executive said: “Lord Darzi’s review of the NHS in England diagnosed a service in crisis; something the NHS 10-Year Health Plan for England is looking to solve.
“Volunteering is not a substitute for long-term, sustained investment in the NHS workforce, but we know from working with our many NHS partners that volunteering can be a significant part of the solution.
“The 10-Year Health Plan must commit to supporting NHS volunteering – and we believe there are huge benefits to be reaped from going further and faster. That’s why, as well as recommending that volunteering should be part of ICB workforce planning and backed by consistent and long-term funding, we’re asking for the Government to commission a national programme to support volunteering as a route into the workforce.
“Helpforce’s Volunteer to Career is a proven model of this type of programme. It gives volunteers experience and support to explore what working in the NHS might be like, at the same time as providing invaluable support to patients and relieving pressure on staff.
“66% of participants go on into health and care roles, education or training. A national programme, built on this strong foundation, could provide a cost-saving way to fill workforce gaps from a pool of motivated and experienced volunteers plus immediate help to patients and staff.”
Our submission:
How volunteering can support the NHS workforce
Helpforce Volunteer to Career
The Volunteer to Career (VtC) programme takes volunteers through a structured process that allows volunteers to get experience and skills in a clinical setting. Over 560 people have joined the programme in a variety of health settings and around a wide range of different roles, including maternity, fitness and wellbeing, community first responders, and ward helpers. The programme:
- Helps meet workforce needs by creating a pool of experienced potential employees with a realistic understanding of what working in health and care involves.
- Delivers immediate volunteer support to patients and reduces pressure on staff.
- Saves money. For instance, reducing the cost of agency staff where volunteers have transitioned into bank staff – estimated for one project as a £15.6k saving each year against the cost of each band-3 agency staff they would otherwise deploy.
Evidence of impact:
- 66% of more than 400 volunteers completing the programme go on to jobs or further education and training.
- 41% of Volunteer to Career volunteers were from ethnic minority groups (compared with 18% of the general UK population) and 28% living in the 20% most deprived localities (compared with 20% of the England and Wales population).
Volunteers can relieve pressure on staff
Volunteers help take the pressure off staff, improving their performance and motivation by:
- Carrying out essential non-clinical and routine tasks, and being ready to intervene at pinch points – for instance to make sure people have their medication and can go home.
- Indirectly by providing community-based support, to improve people’s confidence in managing their own health and, in some cases, prevent unnecessary calls on health professionals.
Evidence of impact:
- 87% of staff agree volunteers improve the quality of care they can provide.4
- 79% of staff say volunteers improve their working lives5
- 83% of staff involved in Volunteer to Career projects agreed or strongly agreed they would ‘recommend my organisation as a place to work’ compared to 73% before the project started – or 61.1% in the NHS 2023 Staff Survey. 6
- 50% of people said they would have approached a healthcare provider for support, if they hadn’t had help from a community ‘hub’. 7
We have asked that:
- ICBs and systems must include volunteering in their long-term workforce plan for 2025 and beyond, strengthening the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan recommendation to “embrace volunteering as part of their overall workforce plan, giving due consideration to programmes that support volunteering as a route into the workforce, such as NHS Cadets and Volunteer to Career.”
- Commission a Volunteer to Career-type programme to help tackle the national workforce shortage in health and care. This proven model could be taken to a far greater scale if there was a national level commission to spread it into new settings, such as system, place and community.
- ICBs provide consistent and long-term funding to allow volunteering services within the NHS and the voluntary and community sector to plan and deliver their services more effectively to relieve pressure on staff (thereby increasing staff retention and wellbeing), and support patients before, during and after treatment.