Volunteers are the oil in the NHS machine. The time is right to get involved

THE brilliant new campaign by the Scottish Daily Mail and Helpforce to inspire people to volunteer in the NHS is timely and vital. Today, 70 years on from its founding, the NHS is under huge pressure to continue providing the amazing care most of us have experienced in our lives. It can’t be left to managers, nurses and doctors to figure it out alone.

If we are to maintain this worldleading tradition we have built up since the founding of the NHS in 1948, it has to be a collective endeavour.

We all can do our bit to help our medical staff get on with the job they are trained to do. And that is what volunteering can do.

It isn’t, of course, a new thing. For decades, since the founding of the NHS, people have volunteered their time to support our health service – from donating blood to helping ambulance first responders. Today, across the UK, nearly 80,000 people continue to give up their time in more than 300 different volunteer roles.

For many of us, we’ll know them as the people in the hospital foyer who help patients and visitors find out where to go. Simple tasks – but vital if a large hospital is to function properly.

Crucially, it frees up medical staff to focus on treatment and care. Unnoticed and often unthanked, volunteers are the oil in the NHS machine.

As health spokesman for the Scottish Conservatives for the past two years, I’ve witnessed so much of this – both in hospitals and outside them, too.

Take one brilliant charity in my own area, Edinburgh, called Contact the Elderly. Every Sunday afternoon, it organises tea parties for small groups of older people aged 75 and over who live alone, allowing them to make new connections and friendships.

It’s the social connections that often help an elderly person cope and enjoy life in the community. You can’t measure this work.

YOU can’t do a cost benefit analysis and prove the volunteers in these charities are saving the NHS a certain figure every year, by helping elderly people stay out of hospital. All you do know is that, were they not to exist, we’d notice.

These charities aren’t staffed by experts or saints – they are staffed by ordinary people who have simply decided to get involved.

As the Daily Mail campaign makes clear, you don’t need any special medical knowledge or training to become a volunteer. Any training you do require will be made available when you sign up.

All you need is to give a few hours a week to commit to support the NHS or a vital charity such as Marie Curie and the British Red Cross.

They provide the human touch that can sometimes be missing in a massive organisation such as the NHS, but which is so important.

Think of a patient who, perhaps, doesn’t have close friends or family to visit while they’re facing treatment.

A volunteer can offer a listening ear for a few hours a week – something that might be the difference between the patient giving in or having the determination to get better.

Equally, a volunteer might make their presence felt in casualty, offering family members a reassuring presence. Imagine a patient with mobility issues who is late for an appointment – often it is a volunteer who will help them find their way.

What about patients who are ready to go home but haven’t organised how best to do so? Again, a volunteer can step up, helping them with arrangements.

Cancer patients in particular benefit hugely from having someone to talk to who has beaten the disease.

A few comforting words, drawn from experience, can be the difference between a patient feeling unable to cope and feeling ready to take on the challenge.

This points to the really significant thing about the Daily Mail campaign. Right across the NHS and in health services across the Western world, there is a growing recognition of the need to move to a new way of thinking in the way we deliver healthcare.

There isn’t a pill for loneliness, for social isolation. Yet, too often in the past, we’ve handed over a complex web of social and psychological issues to a GP clinic or hospital and expected a prescription to make it go away.

Sometimes medication isn’t the answer. Often what works is having someone to talk to, or someone to help. Study after study has shown our physical health is linked to our sense of well-being.

As a society we need to stop thinking that only people with medical degrees can help people get better.

It’s something we can all do. Britain’s 80,000 NHS volunteers – quietly working away in hospitals, supporting people in crisis situations – are doing that every day. I reject the argument of the cynics who criticise volunteering as a way of getting public services on the cheap.

Volunteers don’t take work away from paid staff. The work volunteers do contributes to the healthcare effort of the NHS itself.

Volunteers may not be medically qualified but don’t for a minute think they’re not part of the medical well-being of our country.

IURGE everyone who can to get involved. The NHS is an institution that binds us together. It enshrines our collective belief that healthcare should be free at the point of use, no matter your circumstances.

It symbolises our view that you should be able to get treated without first having to brandish your wallet.

For most of us, the NHS is more than a public service, it is a statement of our values.

Volunteering puts those values into action. You will be helping the NHS to keep going. And, as every volunteer says, you’ll get plenty of personal fulfilment. It’s a win-win.

The NHS is something we built. It’s part of us, and has been for 70 years. It’s time to step up and take part.