General Discussion: 20 May 20025

Please find below a summary of the topics discussed at this session.

Loneliness Awareness Week 9th to 15th June.

• Does loneliness feature in anyone's role or service?

• Does anyone do Loneliness Awareness Training for staff or volunteers?

• Does your service support tackling/addressing loneliness in any way?

• Does anyone have a loneliness hub where people can get information.

Loneliness isn't talked about enough and it has a huge impact on people's mental health and physical health. Befrienders connecting with patients, pre-discharge and helping them to connect with potential community activities helps them to be less lonely on their return home from hospital.

It was felt that more research needed to be done on patients who frequently go back to the hospital. For some it is thought that because they are on their own and lonely it can factor into the reason some patients are admitted on multiple occasions.

Useful links

• More details about Loneliness Awareness Week and other Awareness Days can be found here
• South Tyneside and Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust – Five Steps to mental wellbeing
• New Tackling Loneliness and Social Isolation elearning programme

Where do volunteers sit within your organisation?

There doesn’t appear to be a standard across organisations. Some of the examples covered in this discussion were:

• Hospital Charity
• Nursing
• Patient Experience
• Estates
• HR

Number of retired volunteers has reduced since the pandemic

For one organisation, before the pandemic 55% of their volunteers were retired, now it is less than 30%. There are a number of reasons for this and include the rise in retirement age and the cost of living.

Some organisations are actively working with their HR department to recruit staff who have or are about to retire.

Volunteers’ Week

Lots of preparations are being made for the rapidly approaching Volunteers’ Week. Here are just a few ideas:

• Coffee mornings.
• Tea parties.
• Acknowledging 5, 10, and 20 years of volunteer service.
• Acknowledging the number of hours volunteered with pin badges.
• Thank you, videos.
• Awards for volunteers who have achieved great things despite going through personal difficulties.

Final thought – The use of AI

This is something that is being widely talked about and unfortunately there wasn’t enough time left to have a full discussion so we will be adding this to our list of topics for a future discussion session.

Meanwhile, please use this Forum Link to let us know your thoughts on the topic.