The Government should ‘supersize’ the Volunteer to Career scheme to address workforce shortages in the NHS, say leading health think tanks.
National charity Helpforce, which is piloting the scheme, said the programme had the potential to help fill around 23,600 vacancies in frontline healthcare roles and related study placements in England by the end of the current Parliament.
The Volunteer to Career scheme helps people transition from volunteering into frontline healthcare careers.
The initiative has already enabled people from diverse backgrounds to secure permanent roles in the NHS, including positions such as healthcare assistants, mental health support workers and assistant physiotherapists.
Helpforce has piloted the programme in partnership with 48 NHS organisations across England and is now urging the Government to boost investment as part of its forthcoming NHS 10-Year Health Plan.
The call comes amid a workforce crisis with around 107,000 vacancies in NHS secondary care roles in England and the annual cost of agency and bank staff surpassing £10 billion.
The call is backed by The Health Foundation, The King’s Fund, NHS Providers and St John Ambulance.
Helpforce chief executive Amerjit Chohan said that hundreds of people have taken part in the scheme since its launch in 2022. Those who have transitioned into paid employment include former members of the armed forces, refugees, over-50s, and single parents.
Mr Chohan said that 55% of participants have successfully moved from volunteering into paid healthcare careers or into related study programmes such as nursing and midwifery.
‘Through expertly designed and structured pathways, volunteers can find their niche without the immediate pressure of employment, while being upskilled and given confidence to take into job interviews,’ he said.
He added that there is ‘clear potential’ to ‘unleash the potential of homegrown healthcare talent’.
‘Our analysis shows that with the right investment, there’s clear potential to supersize the opportunity, with conservative capacity for each of the 215 NHS trusts in England to support an average of 50 volunteers annually. Maintaining the same transition rate, we believe that over the next four years, that could set over 23,650 people on a path to fulfilling healthcare careers that benefit not only them, but the whole of society,’ said Mr Chohan (see box).
Helpforce’s analysis of Volunteer to Career suggests significant benefits:
- Individual trusts reported substantial cost efficiencies. For example, West London NHS Trust calculated that recruiting just three Band 4 medical staff from the Volunteer to Career programme, versus employing bank staff, resulted in a £46,800 annual saving.
- 82% of healthcare staff said volunteers improved their working lives, while 90% reported that working alongside volunteers improved the quality of service they could provide.
- Each volunteer supported an average of 190 people.
- 42% of volunteers were from ethnic minority backgrounds and 61% lived in areas ranking within the 50% most deprived – illustrating the programme’s effectiveness at drawing in diverse talent from local communities.
Source: Helpforce
Saffron Cordery, interim chief executive of NHS Providers, said tackling NHS workforce shortages demands innovation and bold thinking.
‘The advantage of expanding an already proven model like this is that good practice can easily be shared to deliver results at scale,’ she said.
Sarah Woolnough, chief executive of The King’s Fund, said that implementing Volunteer to Career on a mass scale would require ‘strategic investment in volunteer managers across NHS Trusts’.
But, she said, ‘such investment would likely be cost-effective when set against paying high fees to agencies that supply temporary staff and helping to reduce the health service’s reliance on recruiting large numbers of healthcare staff from overseas’.
Dr Jennifer Dixon DBE, chief executive of the Health Foundation, agreed.
She said: ‘The results from Helpforce’s far-reaching pilot are significant. Scaling-up Volunteer to Career has to be worthy of serious consideration by a government that’s eager to get people back to work, help with long-standing NHS workforce problems and boost social capital in local communities.’
