This morning a few members of the thinkpublic team attended a Time for Health debate, as part of National Volunteering week. The subject of the debate was ‘The NHS needs volunteers to undertake caring roles?’
Which personally I found very hard to vote for, as I felt that this shouldn’t even be the question we are asking around volunteering, it felt outdated.
Ivan Lewis MP, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Care Services who was for the notion, presented the foreword for the event.
Jun 6th, Alice Osborne said:
It was really interesting to be at the event and meet lots of other people who were carrying out volunteering projects.
One highllighting element for me was the need for volunteers outside of the NHS to be supported, valued and linked within the healthcare system.
It was also great to explore the definition of a volunteer; a lot of people commented on how carers were volunteers but after questioning it was discussed that actually a volunteer has the choice of what they do.
Jun 7th, Ivo said:
It seems to me that there is a need for caring roles in hospitals as often doctors and nurses and everyone else is very busy and doesn’t have enough time to ask simple questions about a patients welfare. The question then would be how do can volunteers fit into these roles without having to be medically trained?
Jun 7th, Deborah Szebeko said:
I agree Ivo, but I also believe nurse and doctors should have time to do this caring role, I think it’s more important than the reams of paper work they have to do.
My main concern is that ‘volunteers in health’ are not just in the NHS, their role is much wider. There are lots of great examples of this, yet they weren’t mentioned.
Jun 9th, Paul Thurston said:
Volunteering roles in health can be anywhere, a previous post of mine highlighted the enthusiastic ‘voluntry work’ of people running local football teams.
Roles like these are never considered as health based but people all over the country give up their time to organise teams and promote participation in sport.
Think about how many people are doing this across all kinds of sports and it’s pretty amazing. The example below is of my team Ansty Sports & Social FC
Jun 19th, Deborah Szebeko said:
After a conversation with Ivo about my post I felt I better write a bit more. I didn’t find the event all negative, I was just disappointed that the focus was on volunteering in hospitals, when infact the NHS is trying to move health service more into the community. Throughout the work we have been doing around volunteering in health we have discovered some fantastic projects using volunteering, that are supporting the health care system and I believe these are the projects we should be also support and talking about, as in fact many of these groups are keeping people well and preventing them entering hospitals in the first place.