Volunteer Training Programme
Background to the new programme
As you may well know, Healthwatch Hertfordshire is undergoing something of a renaissance. We’re bringing in new ways of working and a new structure within the office. We will be more project focused, with an emphasis on the excellent research and engagement we’re becoming known for. As part of this rebirth, we have been looking at our volunteers. The opportunities available to them, the support and growth we provide, and the capacity they have to get involved at different levels within the organisation.
This reflection has allowed us to develop our new volunteer training programme. We have identified core roles and skills that we feel each role entails, and have looked into ways of delivering them. Designed to be modular and easy to follow, each role is broken down into simple components, which create modules. As you progress the components become more and more involved as your skills become more and more developed. It’s been a bit of time coming, but we’re very happy to announce that we’re ready to go.
We want to ensure that our volunteers are able to perform their roles as well as possible. We want to be able to support them and help them grow, offering them opportunities to use and develop existing skills, as well as to gain new ones.
What to expect
We will be rolling this out over the coming months, but in essence it’s a record of all of the training and skills our volunteers have gone through and gained. It outlines exactly what is needed for each of the many roles available to our volunteers, which means that not only is it now much easier to see what has been done in the past, but also it outlines what a person would have to do in order to perform a new role.
Our volunteers have shown themselves time and time again to be amazingly capable, and one of the aims in creating this is to help encourage them to look for different volunteering opportunities within the organisation. Rather than someone thinking of themselves as an ‘Enter and View Volunteer’ or a ‘Representative Volunteer’, our hope is that person will see themselves as a ‘Healthwatch Hertfordshire’ volunteer; someone who is able to turn their hand to a variety of roles and tasks, whether that be representing Healthwatch Hertfordshire at a meeting or at a church fete, conducting an Enter and View visit or helping create social media content.
The way forward
This is just the start. We have only created modules for existing volunteer roles. In the future we will be creating new roles, either generally that will most likely be adaptations or advancements of existing ones, or more project focused roles, which may well be created with existing modules in mind, allowing us to contact already trained volunteers with exciting opportunities to get involved in one of our commended and award winning research projects, and really make a difference to the way health and social care is delivered across the county, and possibly the country!
Volunteers will be introduced to the new training scheme by the various role leads, and if you or someone you know isn’t currently a volunteer but would like the chance to find out what we can offer you.
