Volunteering for Health Conference
Join us for a powerful day bringing together NHS Trusts, system leaders, frontline staff, volunteers, and VCSE partners to shape the future of volunteering across Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent’s healthcare systems. Hear from inspiring speakers, explore our volunteering marketplace, and through interactive workshops, lived experience storytelling, and action focused sessions, we will work together to shape volunteering in our healthcare system – one that is fit for the future.
Over the course of day, you get the opportunity to attend two workshops of your choice.
Morning workshops:
Step Change: from traditional to transformative – a new model of volunteering for health
Explore how volunteers’ professional and lived experience, and community skills can be used more effectively across services. Using real case studies, we’ll challenge traditional volunteering roles and identify where volunteers can add operational value. Participants will discuss what’s working, what barriers still exist, and how to build a culture that welcomes skills based volunteering.
Outcome: Inspiring system partners to identify priority areas where volunteers could make the biggest impact next.
Positive Experience: what keeps volunteers coming back?
This session looks at how to create a positive, consistent volunteer experience. Through volunteer stories and current examples from NHS Trusts, we’ll explore onboarding, day-to-day support, and the reasons why many staff are unsure about how to get volunteers involved. We’ll consider what encourages volunteers to stay, and what pushes them away, identify practical “quick wins” for recognition, communication and wellbeing and explore ways to ensure involving volunteers is a positive experience for all!
Outcome: Simple changes teams can adopt to improve volunteer support and retention.
Afternoon workshops:
Giving Back: why I Volunteer – stories from our healthcare workforce
Discover the wellbeing and professional benefits of volunteering through real stories from health and care staff. We’ll explore why colleagues volunteer, how managers support them, and how micro volunteering can fit around busy roles. Participants will design small, flexible volunteering ideas and discuss how workforce volunteering can be embedded across the system.
Outcome: Staff friendly volunteering ideas and clearer understanding of wellbeing benefits.
Driving Force: leading with volunteering in mind
A strategic session for leaders to explore how volunteering can be treated as a core system asset. We’ll cover governance, risk, and myth busting common concerns about cost, capacity and value. Leaders will discuss how to embed volunteering into service planning and finish by identifying one action they will take forward.
Outcome: Leadership commitments and clearer direction for system-wide volunteering.
Before we close, we’ll come together to share insights from across all four workshops and enabling the creation of our system wide promise to Volunteering for Health that is fit for the future.
Together we’ll share practical ideas, celebrate good practice, build lasting connections, and commit to change and ambition – all working towards one shared goal: creating and embedding “A thriving volunteering culture that supports the Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent Integrated Care System to deliver high quality health and care for our local population.” The Volunteering for Health Conference promises to be an engaging, hands-on event, one that recognises the impact volunteers make across our healthcare system,
Book your place now and help drive change within our communities, ensuring an inclusive culture for Stoke-on-Trent and cohesive future for all who live here.
Find out more about Volunteering for Health here.
If you have any questions, please email events@vast.org.uk.