Helping you create impactful volunteering services
Expert support to develop volunteering services that help solve your organisational challenges and reduce operational pressures.
Since Helpforce was founded in 2017, we have developed more than 180 volunteering services with over 85 health and care organisations across the UK.
We know these services make a difference because we evaluate the impact of all our projects to be sure they deliver on their objectives.
Over 40,000 patients supported
by one project, linking volunteering services in hospital and the community, saving resources and getting people into treatment more quickly
44 minutes saved on discharge
per patient in hospitals that utilise volunteers to help with tasks like fetching To-Take-Away (TTA) medication for patients ready to go home – translating to thousands of hours per week in the average trust
82% of people
agreed volunteer support reduced their anxietyOur approach
Our expert team takes you through a tried and tested consultation process – Adopt and Adapt – to establish volunteer services that tackle your organisational challenges, fit your situation, and optimise integration between health and community services.
Our Adopt and Adapt guidance and tools will help you:
Identify
your organisational needs to find and adopt the volunteering service model that delivers the right solution
Translate
the service model into project plans and stakeholder engagement that suit your local context and timeframe
Adapt
the model into a workable service, ready to launch
Embed
and integrate the service into your ‘business as usual’ operations
Sustain and scale
the service, based on the service’s impact, including insight from Helpforce’s evaluation
Working with us
We work on projects funded by ICSs, NHS trusts and other health and care organisations to introduce new or improved volunteering services tackling key challenges, such as improving patient flow, building workforce or improving access to healthcare and reducing health inequalities.
Thanks to charitable trusts and other generous funders, we can sometimes provide support to help you develop new or existing volunteering services at no direct cost to you.
Working together on a new service
In this video Sara Miles, one of our Programme Managers, describes an important day, starting to work with partners to develop a new volunteering service, designed to support patients after they leave hospital.
“Thank you Helpforce for supporting us to go even further and faster to develop our well-established volunteering offer within our hospitals. We listened to patients, volunteers and staff and, in response, chose to integrate volunteers within clinical teams and to focus more on volunteers improving patient flow through the hospitals. Helpforce kept us on track, acted as a critical friend, asking the right questions and challenging our thinking, including how to measure the contribution of our great team of volunteers. Helpforce employs an insightful and inspiring team to drive up the impact of volunteering; they are a delight to work with.”
Merav Dover, Chief of Staff to CEO Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and SRO National Discharge and Flow
Our model volunteering services in action
Effective integration across place
We supported George Eliot Hospital NHS trust to establish a Pathway that has delivered volunteering services at scale, impacting on strategic priorities like reducing DNAs, pressure on staff and health inequalities
New contact centre to reduce DNAs
We know calls from volunteers in contact centres help people get to their diagnostic and treatment appointments. We’re working with partners in Hillingdon to set up a new, community-based contact centre.
Falls prevention service expanding into community
Volunteers can help people with exercises to support recovery or prevent degeneration. The hospital-based service we helped establish in Kingston is now working with GP practices and care homes, thanks in part to evidence of the impact of the volunteering service.Find out more about Helpforce
About Helpforce
Volunteers are doing great things across health and care, in the NHS and in our communities – but volunteering is still not making the impact it could for patients, staff and on the system as a whole.Helpforce exists to make this happen. Here we explain how.
How we can help you
Helpforce works with organisations across health, care and the community to develop and evaluate services that optimise the difference volunteers can make.Here we explain how we can help you meet key challenges and the specialist services that allow us to do this.
Your Network
At Helpforce, we believe in the value of community and that’s why we created the Network, a free online peer community for professionals from statutory and voluntary sector organisations with an interest in volunteering in health and care.
Discover insights about health and care volunteering – sign up to our monthly newsletter