Comment: Out of a job? At least you can volunteer

By Nick Seddon, Third Sector, 26 March 2008

For some time, the standing NHS refrain has been that morale in the medical profession is at an all-time low, but now unhappy doctor syndrome has reached epidemic levels.

Nothing illustrates this more than the fiasco over the training and appointments scheme for junior doctors, which has left thousands of highly trained professionals jobless. Indeed, so alienated is the system's most important asset - its human capital - that an effigy of Patricia Hewitt, then Secretary of State for Health, was hanged in Crawley, West Sussex, in March 2007 by campaigners complaining about job cuts and service closures. 

But have no fear, chaps. Everything's going to be fine. You might have no job, but you can still volunteer. Statutory agencies should establish 'volunteering hubs' to make the use of volunteers more mainstream, according to a report by Baroness Julia Neuberger, appointed last summer as the Prime Minister's volunteering champion. This, at least, is part of the message of Volunteering in the Public Services: Health and Social Care (Third Sector Online, 10 March). It also says volunteering should be commonplace in health and social care services.

Needless to say, Alan Johnson at the Department of Health gave the report a cheery welcome, calling it a welcome boost to the profile of volunteering in the NHS. That's what happens when you recommend, in effect, what government wants - in this case, something that could produce cost savings and help avert a funding crisis. What better than to employ trained workers without paying them? Best of the lot is the recommendation that the Government should make more of service-users. You can just see it: an unemployed doctor volunteering alongside the mental health patient who's been waiting two years for treatment.

A January report by think tank nfpSynergy found that volunteer numbers were in decline. "The Government's broad message that volunteering is a good thing to do hasn't been effective," said Joe Saxton, co-founder of nfpSynergy. Frankly, I wouldn't blame people if they felt about as inclined to volunteer for statutory agencies as I would be to fill out a Gift Aid form to benefit the Department for Work and Pensions.

- Nick Seddon is an author and journalist: nptseddon@hotmail.com.

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