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Recruiting, training, deploying and supporting volunteers

About Us

Volunteers represent a largely untapped resource that can hugely benefit the quality of life for older people in care homes. Through research, Care Home Volunteers has identified the challenges that care homes currently face in making the most of this precious asset.

And at the same time, we’ve identified the key components that will help provide care homes with volunteers so that they can deliver the fun, joy and stimulation that is sometimes missing for residents.

Norman (a CHV Trustee) interviews Catherine (also a Trustee and a volunteer too.)

See how we operate

Take a look at how Care Home Volunteers trains, deploys and supports newly recruited volunteers by reviewing the tabs below;

RECRUITING

TRAINING

DEPLOYING

SUPPORTING

Recruiting volunteers

  • We work in community areas so that recruitment is locally-based.
  • We ensure that all necessary checks are undertaken and each individual volunteer is agreed with the care home.
  • We make certain that volunteers will benefit from and commit to our training programme and are prepared to volunteer regularly.

Training volunteers

Our training programme ensures that volunteers have the information and support they need to go into care homes and includes the following topics:

  • Safeguarding
  • Confidentiality
  • Social, physical, emotional and communication needs of older people
  • Health and Safety
  • Dementia
  • Meaningful Activities
  • Adopting a person-centred approach.

Between each session our volunteers will have the opportunity to visit the care home they will be volunteering in.

Deploying volunteers

  • We enter into an agreement with each care home so that our roles are clearly defined. When placing volunteers we work closely with individual care homes to take into account their particular practices and values (not all care homes are the same!).
  • We bear in mind the skills and interests of volunteers and match them to the needs of the home and the residents.
  • We support the care home manager, activities coordinators and volunteer coordinators in the management of our volunteers and commit to a regular visit to care homes.

Supporting volunteers

  • Our on-going support for volunteers and care homes continues after the training period.
  • Our staff will contact care homes on a regular basis to ensure that all is progressing well.
  • We have regular ‘get-togethers’ for each cohort of volunteers where we can celebrate good practice and long service, and can continue to learn from each other’s experiences.
  • We involve experienced volunteers in the training of new groups of volunteers.

© COPYRIGHT CARE HOME VOLUNTEERS 2016

Registered Charity Number 1158654