In June this year Dr Neil Churchill, Director for People and Communities at NHS England blogged about the need to invest more in NHS volunteering to reap the benefits for patients, staff and the volunteers.

The Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England periodically fund research and discuss volunteering in the NHS. However, the focus tends to be on directly managed volunteers in a hospital setting, rather than volunteering in a wider health setting, with direct and indirect links to the NHS.

Dr Churchill’s blog and the associated report also adopt this approach. However, one can’t help feeling that something is missing…

The people…over 3 million of them!

So, there are a few hundred thousand volunteers in England who are managed by hospital volunteer managers, but according to the Department of Health’s Strategic Vision for Volunteering, “around 3.4 million people volunteer in health alone”, indicating the vast majority of volunteering within the NHS happens within independent organisations that support the work of the NHS.

For example, local hospital friends groups, who between them have 25,000-35,000 volunteers and 10 times that number of supporters in the community.

So, NHS related research and conversations tend to studiously ignore the bigger picture. Why is this?

• Unaware? Is it because the DHSC and NHS England are not aware that the majority of volunteering in health and social care happens within independent organisations that support the work of the NHS?
• Too difficult? Is researching the many and diverse ways in which 3.4 million volunteers contribute to the work of the NHS too complex for the researchers, or that they haven’t got access to these volunteering networks?
• Too expensive? Would researching this vast field of volunteering cost too much money?
• Can’t see the point? Is it that NHS staff feel they have enough volunteers for the roles that can exist within a hospital setting, and that there is no vision or appetite for engaging the wider community?
• Is it political (small ‘p’)? Is it because this volunteering is part of the wider community and cannot be controlled with the same rules… and that the research findings are likely to point to a need for a different, more nuanced approach to volunteer engagement, which is not within the skills set of many NHS staff?

Whatever the reason, the research hasn’t been done and steadfastly continues not to be done. This is a travesty, when one considers the first line of the NHS constitution is:“The NHS belongs to the people.”

Any volunteering strategy needs to create a climate where people can help where they can, and it’s the role of NHS organisations to engage the community first, and manage volunteers second.

To date however, none of the published research focuses on the first ‘strategy’ of community engagement. It focuses on the second ‘tactic’ of managing volunteers. Ever since hospitals set up their own volunteering programmes in the mid 1960s, it appears the horse has followed the cart, and keeps following the cart. It’s tactics without strategy, which according to Sun Tzu,  is “The noise before defeat“.

So, after the positive public response to the NHS during the Covid-19 pandemic, we have an opportunity to get this right. Someone, somewhere in the NHS needs to get this, and explore how to engage the community first and manage volunteers second.

For example, this could take the form of researching where community engagement works well in particular parts of the NHS. There could be exploration of instances where independent organisations and hospitals work well together, and what makes this work well, like a MoU they have worked on between them.

We just need to see what good looks like and then share this to the people (the managers, the staff, the volunteers, the community groups, the press, the politicians and the wider public). The NHS belongs to all these people …