NHS Yorkshire and Humber Commissioning Support (YHCS) is committed to social value. Team Challenge volunteering is an essential component of our social value programme and is linked to our health and wellbeing agenda. Since April 2014 our teams have completed more than 250 volunteering hours and carried out 14 team challenges with a diverse range of organisations, benefiting adults and children in the most disadvantaged parts of the communities that we serve.
Team Challenges – Promoting health and wellbeing of staff, customers and communities. We have:• Worked with Bradford schools on the Right to Read scheme.
• Hosted a “Dragons Den” where our people acted as mentors to children in Wakefield developing a business opportunity as part of the school’s enterprise week.
• Improved community allotments and gardens in the former mining community of Grimethorpe.
• Supported food banks in Bradford, Leeds, Skipton, Brigg, Hull and York.
• Helped decorate a centre for people with dementia in Leeds.
• Distributed hot food to homeless people.
• Worked in a residential care setting to help people with dementia design personal life story booklets.
The key aim of our Team Challenges is to address health priorities and we believe our approach is unique in NHS England in involving our customers alongside our staff.
Qualitative benefits: • Staff feel more engaged and motivated in the workplace.
• Increased understanding of and better relationships with the communities in which we operate.
• Volunteers learn new skills.
• Improved health and wellbeing for staff and local people.
Benefit to community:
• Work alongside people they may not come into contact with in their everyday lives.
• Outcomes achieved that would not have been possible without volunteers.
• Build aspirations of local people.
• Improve health and wellbeing - volunteers helped to create life story booklets that enable healthcare professionals to see the whole person. Residents benefited from greater social interaction and one to one contact.
• Increased confidence and self-esteem.
• Reduction of social isolation (working with residents with dementia)
Quantitative benefits:• More than 75 staff members participated in our volunteering programme over the past year.
• More than 600 food items were donated to food banks by our staff.
• Our Right to Read volunteers contributed one hour per person per week for 11 weeks, increasing the reading age of their students by six months.
• Volunteers contributed one hour per person per week for five weeks in a residential care setting for people with dementia, reducing social isolation.
• More than 50 children took part in the Dragons’ Den mentoring scheme.
• The Grimethorpe community grows and sells fresh produce, creating greater social cohesion, an increase in healthy eating and a reduction in social isolation.
• Our feeding the homeless programme reached 100 people in a single evening and raised £381.78 to cover the cost of the meal.