Our impact
Explore the difference Helpforce is making across healthcare. From championing volunteering to improving experiences for patients, staff and communities, our Impact section brings together the stories, evidence, and insights behind our work.
Shifting mindset
Healthcare volunteering is not a peripheral ‘nice to have’ - it is an essential, system-critical force. Helpforce champion this belief relentlessly, engaging the public, NHS leaders, policymakers, leading health think tanks, and funders to reframe how volunteering is understood and valued.
Over the past year alone, we have secured...
more than 800 pieces of national and regional media coverage
... bringing to life powerful, real-world stories that demonstrate how volunteers alleviate pressure on frontline staff and transform patient experiences.
This visibility is not just awareness - it is influence. It is what shifts policy, unlocks funding, and drives adoption at scale.
Our work is further strengthened by the endorsement of senior healthcare leaders, influential think tank voices, and prominent public figures - collectively amplifying the case for change.
We have appeared on...
Voices of influence
“Helpforce is the unrivalled guardian of what volunteering excellence looks like in modern healthcare, ensuring services are safe, sustainable, and high impact.
Let’s give the charity the platform and backing to influence, advise, and unlock vital investment – so that NHS staff, patients, and communities can realise volunteering’s true value.”
"Helpforce is doing excellent work to help the NHS and community partners grow and nurture their own volunteering programmes and increase the influence these have within organisations."
Sir Glen Burley, CEO of the Foundation Group Collaborative and HSJ's 'most influential NHS CEO of 2025-26
“Volunteers are integral to the NHS and Helpforce is ensuring the advancement and the quality of volunteering in the healthcare system is second to none. I know from my mother working with the NHS that volunteers are so important to all of the support that is required.”
2x Olympic gold medalist Dame Kelly Holmes
Shaping the conversation
From staging events to sharing our views via leading media outlets including the BBC, LBC, Sky News and Health Service Journal, we raise the profile of healthcare volunteering and influence national directions.
In 2024 and 2026, we held receptions at the House of Commons to bring together distinguished speakers and guests to explore how the healthcare and VCSE sectors, as well as policymakers and funders, can play their full role in transforming the impact of volunteers.
Our persistent external affairs work was rewarded through recognition of the role of volunteering in the Government’s NHS 10-Year Health Plan, which describes volunteers as being “pivotal” to the role-out of neighbourhood health centres.
Backed by our essential evidence
Our extensive evaluations involving over 100 healthcare partners give us powerful insight into the impact of volunteering.
79%
of people agree volunteer support reduced their anxiety
(n = 1400, 16 organisations)
91%
of volunteers report that volunteering gives them a sense of purpose
(n = 779, 28 organisations)
86%
of staff agree volunteers improve the quality of service they can provide
(n = 729, 43 organisations)
Driving investment in healthcare
We help healthcare organisations make the case to attract additional investment in healthcare volunteering
£5,946,352
is the amount of funding that we have helped our partners raise to date
Some of our previous achievements
Our back to health campaign
Our three-year Back to Health campaign was launched in March 2022 with a simple idea and an ambitious goal - to help people across the UK to wait well, get well, recover well, and live well.
In achieving our goal, we have exceeded the milestone of 'one million people reached' through supporting healthcare organisations to create high-impact volunteering opportunities at scale that will help individuals to get more support in hospital, in their community, and at home.
Across organisations – including some of the UK’s biggest NHS trusts – volunteers have undertaken a range of duties including helping people to attend hospital appointments, assisting vulnerable patients to eat and drink, encouraging individuals to improve their mobility, and supporting those in recovery with prescribed physiotherapy exercises.
We are very grateful to all our partners and to the campaign funders: Oak Foundation, Burdett Trust for Nursing, John Armitage Charitable Trust, Garfield Weston Foundation and Peacock Charitable Trust.
Volunteering Innovators Programme
Working with a range of NHS trusts across England, with funding from NHS England and NHS Improvement and Royal Voluntary Service, the Volunteering Innovators Programme (VIP) developed and tested a wide range of volunteering roles and services across the patient pathway. Helpforce worked alongside the trusts to bring together a significant new sources of information on the impact and benefits of hospital volunteering.
Impact reports
2025 - 2026 Impact report
Welcome to Helpforce's Impact Report for 2025 - 26: A year in which we delivered 74 transformative programmes of work and saw growing appreciation of the vital role that volunteering plays in strengthening health systems.
At a time when the NHS continues to face significant pressures, we have been encouraged to see volunteering increasingly recognised as a strategic asset in delivering more sustainable, responsive and compassionate care.
2024 - 2025 Impact Report
A warm welcome to Helpforce’s Impact report for 2024-25 - a year that has seen the charity take purposeful strides towards transforming volunteering across healthcare, while adapting to significant external and internal change.
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