The Kings Fund to deliver project support to Q-Volunteering grantees

The ambulance sector of the NHS in England has a long history of working with volunteers. Traditionally, they have almost exclusively been involved in non-urgent patient transport (e.g. hospital car service, patient escorts) and as community first responders. However, emerging findings from the Q-Volunteering programme are increasing interest in working with volunteers in other ways. In particular, there is interest in using them as a peer resource to increase patients' ability for self-care (thereby reducing repeat calls and demand for ambulance conveyance), and working with volunteers in a more flexible range of ways, highly dependent on local context and priorities of the local health and care system, rather than only the traditional relatively narrow range of involvement.