Volunteers, and their very generous and unique contribution

At Nottinghamshire Healthcare, we are incredibly lucky (and grateful) to have a huge volunteering community who offer their time in lots of different ways around our organisation.

Some volunteers offer their time and their skills, some offer their experience and their personal stories as service users or carers  but all bring their unique generosity to an important role.

We just wanted to share with you a few of the volunteering highlights from the last year, which doesn’t cover everything (not by a long way) but does give a flavour of the collective impact volunteers have in our services and in people’s lives:

• This year, we recruited our first dedicated feedback volunteer at Bassetlaw Hospital, and also a volunteer to help input the feedback we receive onto our feedback website. We now include training on how to capture patient feedback in all volunteer inductions.
• A new volunteer placement was created this year supporting the Live! Project at Highbury Hospital. We recruited two volunteers to help out with the Highbury allotment and also to support staff to deliver activities to patients on the wards.
• 27 new volunteers have been recruited this year to support the delivery of courses at the Trust’s Recovery College.
• A volunteer and her German Pointer PAT dog Flo have been regular visitors to the Lings Bar Hospital in Gamston since last year. Flo’s visits give patients something to focus on that is not health related and can reinforce and retrieve good memories. Some patients who became withdrawn have blossomed when chatting with the volunteer and stroking a very patient Flo’.
• In the last year, we have trained volunteers to carry out a number of different audits including PLACE (Patient-Led Assessment of the Care Environment) Audits, MICE (monitoring infection cleanliness and the environment) audits and the 15 Step Challenge. Over 20 volunteers have been involved with PLACE (Patient Led Assessment of the Care Environment) audits alone this year, in over 12 locations across the Trust.
• In March, a questionnaire asking patients for their feedback about the volunteer befriender scheme at Rampton resulted in unanimous positive responses, with some very poignant and touching replies from the patients about what it means to them to have a Befriender to visit: “I’m not a lost soul.” The questionnaire also elicited very positive feedback from the volunteer befrienders about their roles: “I spend so much time smiling during my visit, my face aches when I leave the hospital.” 46 patients at Rampton are supported by befrienders.
• 431 active volunteers are supporting the work of the Children Centres, providing over 12,000 hours a year contribution to the community. All volunteers attend a 6 week course with a chance to attend a further short course to become a more specialist volunteer in breastfeeding peer support or as a perinatal befriender.

In total, we think our volunteers offer roughly 45,000 hours to our Trust every year. It’s tricky to estimate it exactly, but that’s a conservative estimate!

Thank you, sincerely, to all our wonderful volunteers for everything you do.