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Exploring the working role of hospice volunteers
Dr Jacqueline Watts Senior Lecturer, The Open
University BSA MedSoc Conference,
Chester September 2011
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Context

• Voluntary work, as uncommodified work, is shaped
  by diverse motivations altruism, community
  involvement fostering sense of self in the
  world
• Growth of voluntary sector due to increased cost
  of buying in services from the formal economy
  (Noon Blyton, 2007)
• Different types of voluntary work
  career/casual, formal/informal,
  occupational/non-occupational (Stebbins, 1996)
• Volunteering evokes different forms of
  commitment, identification allegiance (Newman
  Mooney, 2004)
• Partnership between voluntary sector, government
  business has resulted in the professionalisation
  of much voluntary work

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Hospice services in the UK

• 716 hospices in-patient palliative care units
  in the UK, most with registered charity status
  (Watts, 2010)
• Services day care, bereavement counselling,
  complementary therapy, day and night sitting
  services, respite and terminal care
• Intimacy at scale
• Multidisciplinary approach to care leads to mixed
  staffing profile doctors, nurses, social
  workers, chaplains, physiotherapists volunteers
• Managers from the business sector often now
  recruited to head up the hospice operation

 
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The Study

• Aim to develop understanding about motivation
  and experience of working as a hospice volunteer
• Setting large well-established English hospice
• Mixed methods focus group with 8 participants
  and 2 semi-structured interviews
• Small-scale pilot study to inform the design of a
  larger research project

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Participants

•  
• All women
• Age range 41 to 77 years
• None in paid work
• Variety of volunteer roles represented
  receptionist, coffee shop assistant, day care
  worker, bereavement counsellor complementary
  therapist

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Motivation to volunteer

• Giving back a gift to be earned repaid
  (Sinclair, 2007)
• Temporal structure to weekly routines
• Socially useful work
• Opportunity to develop friendships and have
  social contact
• Maintain skills developed in professional role
  prior to retirement
• Gain experience to support application onto a
  qualifying social work programme at local
  university

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Training Support

• Induction initial training mandatory death
  education, principles of palliative care,
  understanding grief loss, team working, ethical
  principles
• Ongoing formal support from supervisor
• Informal peer support from co-volunteers greatly
  valued
• Regular updates including education sessions
• Deficit areas diversity (particularly cultural
  and religious difference) and spirituality/spiritu
  al care (what is it and should this just be left
  to the chaplain?)

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Challenges for volunteers

• Emotionally demanding work
• Increased scrutiny accountability paralleling
  the paid work model
• Rise in managerialist approach
• Less flexibility
• Valued but also taken for granted

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Challenges for Voluntary Service Managers

• Volunteers who wont leave or retire from their
  volunteer career (Hamilton, 2009)
• Lack of cultural diversity in the volunteer
  workforce
• Constraints on budget resources for education,
  training and support of volunteers

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The future of hospice volunteering

• Hospices cannot continue to provide the current
  level and breadth of services without the ongoing
  contribution of volunteers
• The volunteer roles of emotional comforter,
  spiritual supporter, palliative caregiver
  therapeutic healer represent a division of
  healing labour greatly appreciated by service
  users
• Voluntary work in the hospice sector looks likely
  to increasingly draw on practices from the paid
  labour market including annual appraisals and
  satisfaction reviews (OBrien Wallace, 2009)

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A concluding comment
Whilst the hospice setting for this research
sees volunteers as essential to service
provision, Sheldon (1997) notes that in some
hospices volunteers are positioned as
handmaidens to the professional team and can be
resented because of the substitution of
volunteers for tasks previously undertaken by
professionals.
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