1. Demonstrating the impact of
volunteering: Lessons from (our..)
research
David Buck
Senior Fellow in Public Health and Health Inequalities, The
King’s Fund
20th March 2014
Demonstrating the impact of volunteering, The British Medical
Association, London

3. The aims
“To gain a greater understanding
of the role, size, scope and value
of volunteering in the health and
care sector”
“To understand how health
reform, particularly the
development of any qualified
provider, will impact on
volunteering in the sector.”
..but not about the voluntary
and community sector per se

4. The experience..
Where we started...
Where we finished...
...focus on hospital providers and reform impact
on volunteering: opportunities and challenges of
more diverse providers...
...much broader perspective on role of volunteers in
community, as well as with providers
... opportunities and challenges of reforms and
wider economic environment and existing trends in
volunteer diversity for providers, commissioners
and volunteers

5. How much do we already know?
Incomplete information on scale &
scope
Motivations for volunteering vary
Strong (but fragmented, few
“numbers”) evidence for health &
social benefits to volunteers
Building social capital & community
resilience
Benefits to patients less easy to
demonstrate
Do volunteers complement or
substitute paid staff?

6. Did we already know?

7. The relationship between services and
communities
“I think volunteers are the future of the NHS, are the
coproduction element, and really the NHS meeting its own
aspirations of a partnership between people and
government”
GP commissioner
“Without volunteering we would have no interface or a very
difficult interface with this community, it’s absolutely
essential to our engagement with this very diverse
and very complex community”
Local authority commissioner

8. The changing role of volunteers
“There are jobs, there are certain tasks that once upon a time
some trained staff would be doing but now they’re using
volunteers more and more and more… I’m just very
concerned about the whole, bigger picture of the
authorities using volunteers...”
Hospital volunteer
“What we’ve tried to do is to push de-professionalisation as
far as you possibly can, because that’s the way you get bang
for your bucks. You create a snowball effect which doesn’t
involve paying professionals who are very expensive.”
GP commissioner

9. Financial pressure
“What I’m hearing is a repeated refrain… something that I
have not heard for a very long time, which is we don’t want
to be doing this on the cheap, we shouldn’t be using
volunteers to replace public services. Now it’s a long time
since I’ve heard that as a refrain and my reading of it is the
impact of the cuts, the squeeze on public services is
making people super-sensitive to then giving their
services for nothing or requiring others to give their
services for nothing, so I think it’s been a bit of a game-
changer”
Local authority commissioner

10. Key recommendations...

11. The aims
“To gain a greater understanding
of the role, size, scope and value
of volunteering in the health and
care sector”
As a starting point, a national
survey of NHS acute hospital
trusts and case studies
Questions on volunteers, roles,
impact and funding for volunteer
services

12. Findings

13. Findings

14. Findings

15. Findings
A (too) simple measure of impact for our sample…
“Minimum” benefits
– Across the sample the hours donated by volunteers
– An average pay rate for equivalent work*
Costs
– The cost of managing and training volunteers
> Benefit to cost ratio
* Band 2, Agenda for Change, several trusts in our sample using this

16. Findings

17. Findings
But measures for who and for what purpose…
– Recruiting and retaining volunteers – their experience an
sense of achievement?
– Improving patient experience – patient’s experience
(FFT?)
– Improving patient outcomes – outcomes from treatment
(inc QALYs?)
– Costs and utilisation – impact on throughput/LoS?
– Organisational relationship with community – sense of
ownership/engagement?
– Commissioners – cost/outcomes/avoiding readmission
etc etc…

18. Findings

19. Findings

20. For more...
The final report
http://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/volunt
ary-and-community-sector-health
The background literature review on benefits of
volunteering
http://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/volunt
eering-health-and-care
Full NHS acute trust survey results, and our
views on them,
http://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/volunt
eering-acute-trusts-england