Event held on 5 February 2025

Focus Discussion: Your vision for 2025: Let's talk about your ambitions for the year

“One of the things we're seeing across health and care organisations is a shift towards supporting the hospital's wider agenda around prevention. We know people are best if they're kept at home as long as they can, and people are starting to open their minds to what that means in terms of voluntary services and how they can help to provide some of that support out in that community.”

Ambitions and ongoing projects

• Some are in the final year of their strategy and are already looking at a new one.

• One trust is including volunteers in a roster so that department managers can record attendances and absences. This is to help with the new data collection requirement for NHS England.

• Started to think about a strategy in a mental health trust for peer support volunteers

• Healthwatch are already doing some great work with their local NHS trusts but are keen to do more.

• A Trust has recently merged with a neighbouring Trust and is now looking at creating a joint strategy.

• A Trust has taken a look at how volunteering has changed over the years. This has raised a lot of questions. For example, should they go back to basics? How is the mental health crisis and cost of living constraints influencing volunteering?

• A charity is going through an exciting but challenging period. The impact that volunteering can have on the wider charity has been recognised, so they now want to make sure that they can deliver on all aspects of volunteering and expand their offer. This has resulted in three more members of volunteer staff.

• Recruiting for Pets as Therapy is ongoing at one Trust, and they now have six going through the process. The pets have been a great success in their elderly wards and children’s day unit.

• A project is being piloted that involves volunteers in assisted feeding. The training is due to take place shortly.

• Create opportunities for volunteers to move into roles within two Trusts – passporting style operation.

• Ambition for 2025 is to have a 4-year strategy.

• Some of the models of volunteering don’t suit today’s volunteers so one Trust will be experimenting, raising a greater awareness of volunteering, diversity and inclusion. There will be a lot of collaboration on an ICS level as well as internally.

• In one area local services are going through a lot of change, transformation and integration and the Trust would like to leverage that energy to make new ways of volunteering happen.

• A focus on local community health care services.

• Make volunteering more ‘work smart’ and more essential to the organisation.

Integrating volunteering into the community

• A Trust has community drivers who are managed by a virtual hub administrator, and they are looking at getting involved in a responders’ programme.

• A guest recently attended a webinar where they were talking about returning mobility aids, syringe drivers and other equipment. They will be looking at doing something like this during the coming year.

• Several organisations are prioritising making better connections between healthcare and community settings across an ICB.

• A volunteer service has full backing from their Trust to put together a plan to merge or better connect with primary care and collaborate with the VCSE sector as an obvious way of supporting the local community in a joint effort. To align with the proposed NHS 10-year plan the key topics would be:

1. Keeping people at home longer
2. Virtual Wards
3. Prevention

Training

• While working with her manager on their strategy one volunteer lead is looking at renewing the volunteer policy and streamlining it as they are losing potential volunteers because of the time it takes to on-board and train.

• Often, we hear that volunteer training is the same as an employed member of staff and not all of it is necessary and just lengthens the on-boarding process.

• It was felt that it is important to make sure when training volunteers that they understand the difference between a volunteer and a paid member of staff. Particularly around peer support roles as some of these are paid roles and others where it is part of their return-to-work process.

• Some experienced volunteers may feel that they can undertake the same tasks as a paid member of staff and need to be reminded of the boundaries.

• Where volunteers are doing the same training as staff there is a case to be made that the volunteers training should be different not only from the time frame but also to make it clear that a volunteer's role is different to paid members of staff.