Can teenagers with nothing to do save the NHS?
A new BBC experiment placing young volunteers in hospitals has had a profound effect, participants tell Margarette Driscoll
This time last year, Charlotte Buck regarded herself as an unemotional person. Not cold exactly, but headstrong and determined, focused on her studies and launching her career. She became a volunteer at the Royal Derby Hospital mostly out of self-interest: if she wanted to specialise in medical law it would help tick the box marked “relevant experience”.
Instead, her six weeks on the wards proved a physical, mental and emotional challenge that has changed everything. “It made me think about how I connect with people, about my family, made me question things I’d never questioned before,” she says. “You build such strong bonds with patients so quickly. It’s really intense.”
Charlotte, 21, was one of 14 young people from around Britain chosen to take part in a trial in Derby, based on a German scheme which sees some 90,000 young people every year volunteering in hospitals and care homes.
In the latter years of conscription in Germany, which ran from 1956 to 2011, youngsters could choose to do their national service either in the military or by volunteering in the care sector, a tradition which has continued, giving German hospitals a constantly refreshed band of enthusiastic – and free – workers, similar to British healthcare assistants.
Could a similar programme work here? The NHS already has an army
of volunteers to help with admin jobs, manning reception desks, chatting to patients and providing emotional support. This group – filmed by the BBC for The Big Hospital Experiment, which starts this week – is the first to get involved in clinical treatment, feeding and washing, taking hourly observations, monitoring patients in the high dependency unit and helping with wound care.
The idea came from a chance conversation in a south London pub 15 years ago when James O’reilly, creative director of The Big Hospital Experiment, was at university. He got talking to a visiting German student who seemed “so much older and cooler than us”. It turned out he had just spent nine months volunteering in a German hospital: “While we’d been acting like idiots and getting drunk, he’d had first-hand experience of life and death and could amaze us all with eyeopening experiences of emergency and trauma and all the things you experience on a hospital ward.”
O’reilly continued to be fascinated by the concept and, when he got the chance to make a documentary about the NHS, was determined to make it happen. Which might make for a great TV, but when life in the NHS is a constant battle against the odds, with staff and funding at crisis levels, overflowing wards, ageing patients and a social care sector unable to relieve the strain, why would anyone agree to throw a group of young, inexperienced amateurs into the mix? The Royal Derby’s gamble was that such volunteers might become part of the solution.
“Obviously, there’s a level of risk involved and, as far as I’m aware, there isn’t anyone in the acute sector using trained volunteers alongside clinical staff,” says Cathy Winfield, the trust’s executive chief nurse. “But we saw this could enhance the team around the patient. Family isn’t always there for our patients, you can be on your own and your daughter lives 150 miles away. We saw this as having the potential to fill that gap.”
The volunteers, who spent six weeks at the Royal Derby late last year, were put through basic training, learning to administer first aid, CPR and take blood pressure. On her first day, Charlotte struck up a conversation with Audrey, one of the patients she had been assigned, and to her surprise a caring instinct came to the fore. “I’d thought connecting with people was going to be a challenge, but we got really close. I was helping her to the bathroom and rubbing cream on her because she couldn’t reach her legs. So that was a start,” she says.
Her most challenging stint was on the renal ward, where there were some seriously ill patients – some needing dialysis, others at risk of seizures or sepsis – three of whom died on the same day. Charlotte had got to know one of the men who was terminally ill and spent the last few hours of his life by his side, cooling his forehead with damp cloths as his temperature soared.
“I kept stroking his hand and chatting to him, trying to get him to hold on until his family arrived,” she says. “I used to be someone who could not talk about death, did not want to think about it, but though my mind was racing, I thought: ‘OK, you need to do this.’ ”
Though she is as determined as ever to make it to bar school, she has moved home for a year to save money and spend time with her mother, Janine. “I’d moved away from Kent and hadn’t been home for ages. I worked two jobs while at university in Leicester, so I didn’t get to see my mum very often at all,” she says. “I was just thinking about my goal and not the people who’d supported me all the way along to achieve it.”
The experiment became food for thought for the hospital, too. Youngsters may soak up resources in training and supervision but, as in Germany, they offer energy, enthusiasm and a free source of labour. Winfield is now looking at ways in which the hospital’s existing volunteer force could be more integrated into clinical care. She believes a wider volunteer programme for young people across the NHS could both relieve pressure on the health service and help attract them into rewarding careers in healthcare they might not otherwise consider.
Not everyone will be cut out for it, but the Derby experiment suggests that even volunteers who don’t seem promising can come into their own.
A million miles from Charlotte and her “head girl” approach was 20-year-old Will Muncey, who was urged to take part by his parents. Charming, chatty but rudderless, Will had been drifting from one job to another, working for an estate agency, then pulling pints. When he arrived at his first placement, on the head and neck ward, his main concern was not whether he was up to the job but whether he could split his half-hour break time into three ten-minute slots to nip out for a fag.
Then, a week or so later, as he was taking routine observations, he noticed something was wrong. A patient he was talking to did not seem properly responsive and had a very weak pulse. He raised the alarm and the hospital’s crash team arrived: to his surprise, he might have saved someone’s life.
Will’s breezy chit-chat as he took observations brought a smile to his patients’ faces but, like Charlotte, he was unprepared for the closeness he began to feel towards them.
When he heard a man he had got to know on the cancer ward was being allowed home, he was delighted – but then realised it was because there was no more the doctors could do: “He was the most lovely guy. I was a bit lost for words.”
As with Charlotte, facing up to these hard realities has changed his outlook.
“The biggest thing I learnt was a whole new respect for the NHS. It doesn’t matter whether you are a doctor or a porter, everything you’re doing really matters.”
Though he is now back pulling pints, Will has arranged an interview for a more permanent job. His stint in the NHS was his parents’ idea – what will they think when the programme is broadcast? “I’m told my mum will be quite proud of me,” he says. “We’ll see.”
‘Young people offer energy and a free source of labour’