Rank Foundation Hospice Grants

Overview

What does Volunteer to Career offer?

Hospice UK’s Volunteer to Career programme will award grants of £10,000 each to up to 10 hospices to support the professional development and recruitment of volunteers considering a career in healthcare.

In addition to the funding grant, Hospice UK and partner charity Helpforce will:

• help each participating hospice to identify and build internal capacity to deliver the work
• help each hospice to find and match interested volunteers from their local communities
• provide a blended learning programme for participating hospice Clinical Leads, who will work within their hospices to mentor the new volunteers
• help with project planning and data collection to build evidence of the value of the project.

In Round 1, they are supporting four hospices to implement the programme. They are currently running Round 2 of the applications process.

How does it work?

The volunteers taking part in Volunteer to Career will undertake 60 hours of certificated training over the course of one year.

This training will require support from a dedicated Clinical Lead at their hospice.

By the end of their training, volunteers will be supported onto a career pathway aligned to your hospice’s identified workforce needs i.e. either via a university course, workplace apprenticeship, or paid employment route into eventually becoming a healthcare assistant (clinical band 2 or 3) or a nursing associate (clinical band 4).

Eligibility

Eligible organisations are independent adult and children's hospices that are members of Hospice UK and based in the UK, Isle of Man and the Channel Islands.

Available Funding

In Round 2, they are looking to award up to 6 grants of £10,000 each.

This is to contribute towards the cost of supporting Clinical Leads to undertake this piece of work. Please note that other expenses arising from the programme (e.g. volunteer expenses) will need to be covered by the hospice.

Further Reading

They encourage you to read about how other hospices have benefitted from running the Volunteer to Career programme:

• St Oswald's Hospice in Newcastle-upon-Tyne have a webpage dedicated to their experience of running the VtC programme
• St Elizabeth's Hospice in Suffolk wrote an article for Helpforce, offering five top tips for running the VtC programme - reflecting on their experience.