Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust share their 8 tips to successfully launch a Discharge Response Volunteering service: their NHS productivity game-changer

Within seven weeks of working with Helpforce, the Volunteering team at Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust successfully and unprecedentedly developed and launched the Discharge Response Volunteer (DRV) Service in January 2025.

This service has volunteers completing discharge-related tasks across two of their hospitals, to improve patient flow and increase staff capacity, enabling them to fulfil their clinical roles. After 10 months of running this new initiative, it’s now seen as ‘business as usual’, after delivering fantastic outcomes:

• 31 volunteers completed 3,647 priority tasks, which generated 427 hours of productivity gains and resulted in 4,031 patients being supported / items being delivered.

• 95% of staff reported volunteers improved their working lives, 77% of staff said the volunteers freed up time for them, and 69% of staff reported that volunteer support helped them feel less stressed.

• The scheme influenced a change in Pharmacy Policy to allow volunteers to deliver controlled drugs – predicted to increase pharmacy run tasks by approximately 30% and generate a further 133 hours per year of productivity from this particular task.

Anna Sterckx, Head of Patient, Carer and Public Engagement at the Trust, has written this short blog to share her insights and tips to help other NHS Trusts to adopt this impactful and efficient volunteering model.

1 - Engaging with key stakeholders from early on

One of the key reasons we were able to launch the service so quickly was thanks to early engagement with key stakeholders, which includes senior leaders, volunteers and clinical staff. Our stakeholders became founding members of the DRV Steering Group, which has been in place from the beginning of the project.

The Steering Group has been a great way to ensure regular and effective communication as the service was implemented and embedded. We used monthly meetings to share progress, gain support, discuss and overcome issues and barriers and develop joint solutions – acknowledging concerns and building relationships. Wrapped around this we ran a series of task and finish groups to drive developments practically.

I believe our collaborative approach makes a huge difference as it enables people to take part in and really own a project, gaining real buy-in from volunteers, staff and senior leaders.

The Steering Group has been an essential part of raising the profile of both the DRV project and the volunteering team, which is now more consistently considered as part of solutions to operational issues. This is a real shift in organisational behaviour.

Tip: Identify and engage all relevant teams early on. Their buy-in is essential to making volunteers an integrated and trusted part of the service.

2 - Improving recruitment processes to speed up service launch

To enable us to recruit volunteers into the Discharge Response Service and launch within seven weeks, we completed a full review of the recruitment and onboarding process in advance.

We trialled a new way of recruiting volunteers because we could see the benefit of the service to patients and staff, ensuring they weren’t waiting for their discharge medication – we knew we needed a more efficient, simple and smooth recruitment process to support this.

With the launch of DRV we started a new way of recruiting, inducting and onboarding our volunteers. We started in a small way with the focus on DRV volunteers and we have now expanded this to cover all types of volunteering at the Trust. We often invite members of staff to talk about the volunteering opportunities in their area, bringing the process to life and giving potential volunteers a chance to ask questions and understand more about the role. This face-to-face process works well and ensures we can set expectations clearly, offering reassurance - we are here to help. Importantly, our streamlined process maximises on people’s time and ensures that we can process someone to become a volunteer much quickly than previously. Before we developed our new process it would take approximately 6 weeks to process a volunteer – we can now complete this in two weeks.

Once recruited, volunteers are onboarded together and made to feel welcome and become part of a team that makes a difference.

3 - Asking teams to ‘adopt’ volunteers

One of the biggest challenges many trusts face is volunteers not feeling valued or being fully occupied in their role. This can lead to inconsistent impact and frustration on both sides. To overcome this, we introduced our “Adopt a Volunteer” initiative. This means wards or teams formally adopt volunteers, setting joint expectations about what volunteers will do and what support they will receive.

This approach helps volunteers feel part of the team and wards know exactly how to use their support. It’s a simple but powerful way to embed volunteers into daily routines.

And that’s exactly what we did with the DRV project - we invited the Pharmacy team to adopt the volunteers when we first trialled the service. This has embedded the DRVs as part of the Pharmacy team and has definitely secured the success.

4 - Being flexible and open-minded

When we first started, we assumed ward nursing staff would be the ones who most needed volunteers’ support.

However, early experience showed that Pharmacy staff requested volunteer support more frequently, especially for tasks like delivering take-home medicines (TTOs).

As a result, we decided to focus on building a seamless and efficient process to support the Pharmacy team alongside offering support to our wards and departments. Our approach has worked really well, and we have been able to demonstrate that volunteers are capable of doing more – this has led to the ongoing expansion of the service, which now also includes the delivery of controlled drugs.

By integrating volunteers into the Pharmacy team, volunteers are able to free staff from travelling between wards and the pharmacy to collect drugs, which gives staff more time to focus on other complex drugs, at the same time, speeding-up the discharge time as patients are able to go home more quickly.

Tip: Be ready to flex your service to ensure it meets emerging demands and gain ownership early on.

5 - Capturing the right impact data

In less than a year, we were able to establish and integrate this new service into our organisation, and now it’s seen as ‘business as usual’. This doesn’t happen overnight, but through consistent demonstration of why this service works, coupled with the data we have collected and insights provided by Helpforce, the initiative has gained a powerful voice.

After working with the Helpforce team in designing and evaluating the programme, we have become more adept at selecting data that can tell the story. Now, we are confidently capturing the volunteering activity needed to demonstrate the ongoing value of the DRV service. This enables us to keep our stakeholders engaged, sharing not just the number of hours kindly donated by the volunteers but the number of patients supported, completed tasks and the time it’s taken to complete each task from across the two sites (Worcestershire Royal Hospital and The Alexandra Hospital Redditch). This data enables us to work out the capacity gains generated by the volunteers and to monitor the service and ongoing value.

We will incorporate this data into our existing volunteer app, which we have developed ourselves with the Trust IT team. The Trust Information team is producing a live dashboard ensuring we have this data at our fingertips.

Tip: We continue to find ways to share this data with volunteers in a variety of ways, to ensure that we can demonstrate the incredible impact that our volunteers are making, each and every time they are here. This builds commitment to the service, but just as importantly, it helps our volunteers understand their value, purpose and importance to making a difference to the NHS.

6 - Start small, then grow

We began with one initial task: volunteers delivering take-home medicines to just a few wards in one of our hospitals, which allowed us to test the processes of ward and pharmacy staff making delivery requests and how the volunteers were deployed to fulfil those tasks.

Using the Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA) process, we were able to iron out teething problems ahead of rolling the service out to more wards. And we learnt a lot by taking this approach – the amount of ongoing engagement needed with both Pharmacy and ward staff, the time deliveries take to optimise how many volunteers are available, and we were able to develop robust governance and risk management processes.

As we grew in confidence, we scaled the service to incorporate more tasks and set up at our Alexandra hospital as well. The service has now also expanded to include delivery of missed doses, controlled drugs, and we are developing Phlebotomy runs. We also support wards with local surveys, packing patient bags and a variety of tasks that our staff can bleep or email for support with.

This gradual growth approach helped us manage risks and adapt processes as needed, ensuring volunteers were supported and safe. We carried each of these steps with our volunteers and with key stakeholders in partnership.

Tip: Start with low-risk, high-impact tasks and expand roles as you learn and build trust.

7 - Proactive volunteer engagement makes a difference

What we absolutely love about the Discharge Response Volunteering role is that it has the flexibility to expand with potential for volunteers to complete even more discharge-related tasks, such as: packing patients’ bags, chatting with vulnerable patients as they wait for transport, etc.

Thanks to the flexibility of the DRV model of being able to work across the hospital site, when fewer staff requests are coming through centrally, volunteers complete ‘downtime tasks’ which see them proactively visit wards to offer support. They “sweep” wards, knocking on doors and asking if they can assist with discharge tasks.

Volunteers also liaise with capacity hubs and clinical site teams to identify discharge needs in real time. This proactive approach strengthens volunteer integration and responsiveness.

Tip: Encourage volunteers to be proactive and visible — it builds relationships and trust with staff.

8 - Governance and Risk Management are crucial

Expanding volunteer tasks whilst ensuring safeguarding, information governance, and ethical considerations is a lot of “up front” effort and requires active monitoring, but the pay back for that time is significant:

• The process of working through the governance layers builds trust and buy in with clinical teams and specialists and has reduced implementation barriers.

• We had added the complexity of needing to update multiple layers of governance associated with enabling volunteers to deliver controlled drugs as one of their tasks. This took considerable work; however, with this now in place, volunteers can delivery approximately 30% more of the drug runs across the hospitals.

Tip: Build governance and risk management into your volunteer service from the start, involving all relevant oversight teams.

Final thoughts

Embedding volunteers into NHS services requires more than just recruiting people — it demands thoughtful integration, strong stakeholder engagement, and clear governance. By running initiatives like “Adopt’ a Volunteer”, regularly engaging pharmacy and nursing teams early, starting small, and encouraging proactive volunteer involvement, we have been able to build a sustainable, impactful volunteer service that is now business as usual.

I am delighted to see that the service has blossomed and made a huge difference to our staff and patients. I would like to credit the Helpforce team in helping us to successfully launch and evaluate the service. They have shared insights, best practice and suggestions to help us get to where we are today.