I was lucky to have an opportunity to discuss volunteering in healthcare settings, primarily hospitals, with NCVO, NHS England, NHS Trusts, a Healthwatch and Investing in Volunteers assessors. In the NHS’s Five Year Forward View , increasing community engagement including through volunteering is one the aims (see chapter 2). The purpose of the meeting was to look at how working towards and gaining Investing in Volunteers could help with this.
Organisations that have achieved the Investing in Volunteers quality award identify that it has had a positive impact on their volunteering programmes (see the Investing in Volunteers Impact Assessment downloadable from WCVA ), but I wondered what the bigger picture was in terms of evidence about how volunteering helped to improve patients’ health outcomes.
So here are some of my thoughts after a quick review of the literature on the way home. I look at:
It’s not intended to be exhaustive, it’s a fairly short train journey back to Market Harborough, but I think provides a case:
Faulkner and Davies (2004) break down volunteering support into four categories – the interpretations and comments are mine:
It is the power of volunteers to provide emotional support and why this is so important that I will focus on. The impact of social isolation on health is well documented. Hilary Cottam in a paper or excellent and thought provoking TED Talk discusses how public services have become a series of transactions, but what is really transformation is the relationship between people – for example we know that the strength of the relationship between a therapist and a client is more important than the specific approach they take (De Haan, 2008).
Neuroscience helps with explanation: our brains are not optimally configured but have adapted over time and the different parts are not always working in harmony with each other. The best model that we have is that of the triune or three part brain, a reptilian part that deals with instinctive behaviour, the mammalian brain that developed to care for our young that processes emotions, and the prefrontal cortex, the rational thought bit that we prize in the west. Because of this Lewis et al point out, much of people’s brains are not “amenable to the pressure of argument and…much of one’s brain does not take orders” (2001: 33), instead identifying that changing how someone feels is a matter of tuning in to them at an emotional level, which has the ability to stablise and change their emotional state. It is this that clinical staff often don’t have time for, but volunteers do. Handy and Srinivasan (2004) highlight the important role of volunteers in reducing patients’ anxiety, which they identify is important in quality of care. In addition, Hotchkiss et al cite research in America that “volunteers are more agreeable and extroverted than paid employees who performed the same jobs. This allows what otherwise might be an impersonal environment to become more personal and enhances patient satisfaction” which they theorise gives the organisation a “competitive advantage,” a notion that might be a bit strange (at least at the moment) to our NHS (2014: 1112).
Hotchkiss et al (2014) identify a number of ways that volunteers can help hospitals or other services:
The Institute for Volunteering Research along with NAVSM has published Health check A practical guide to assessing the impact of volunteering in the NHS this discusses their work in a number of NHS Trusts across the country.
De Haan, E. (2008) Relational coaching. Chichester: John Wiley.
Faulkner, M., & Davies, S. (2005). “Social support in the healthcare setting: The role of volunteers” Health and Social Care in the Community , 13.
Handy, F., & Srinivasan, N. (2004) “Valuing volunteers: An economic evaluation of the net benefits of hospital volunteers” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly , 33
Hotchkiss, R., Unruh, L., and Fottler, M. (2014) “The Role, Measurement, and Impact of Volunteerism in Hospitals” in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly , 43(6)
Jones, H. (2004). Volunteering for health. Wales Council for Voluntary Action, Welsh Assembly Government. Available at www.wales.nhs.uk/documents/volunteering-for-health-report-e.pdf
Lewis, T., Amini, F. and Lannon, R (2001). A general theory of love. New York: Vintage Books.
Naylor, C., Mundle, C., Weaks, L., Buck, D. (2013) Volunteering in health and care Securing a sustainable future , The Kings Fund, available from http://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/volunteering-health-and-care
Rogers, S., Jiang, K., Rogers, R. and Intindola, M. (2016) “Strategic Human Resource Management of Volunteers and the Link to Hospital Patient Satisfaction” in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 45(2)