How Can Volunteers in the NHS Be Best Supported?

This study aims to investigate the impact of volunteers in the English National Health Service (NHS) and increase the evidence base for supporting and developing volunteering to best help patients and services. The research will focus on one relatively established role: Community First Responders (CFR) supporting the ambulance service in English NHS Ambulance Trusts. We will take a mixed methods approach, combining qualitative and quantitative methods to learn more about the effectiveness and wider perceived value of the CFR role from the perspectives of CFRs themselves, other NHS staff and NHS patients who may interact with them.

Our primary Research Question is: How can we maximise the impact of the Community First Responder role? Secondary Research Questions focus on what we can learn from the Community First Responders to support volunteer roles more widely. In particular: How can policy makers improve the deployment of volunteers? How do staff perceive the support they receive from volunteers (including impact on their workload and morale)? How do patients perceive the support they receive from volunteers? How are volunteers impacting services? What opportunities are there for further developing the volunteer role? We will work with (up to five) Ambulance Trusts already involved in the National Ambulance Volunteering Dashboard to extract quantitative data from existing management systems. These data will focus on (1) number and demographic characteristics of CFRs; (2) aggregate CFR activity (incidents attended, first on scene, responses times, response outcomes) and (3) CFR incident data (including location, time, category and CFR attendance). From these Trusts we will select 2 for qualitative data collection consisting of documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews with CFRs, NHS staff and patients. This research aims to generate evidence to inform decisions on where policymakers can most efficiently focus future volunteer interventions and how the NHS can best support volunteers in the system.