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As the focus of care expands on professionalised work to include the resource of carers and communities in meeting care needs, the role of both professionals and citizens will increasingly change. This is arguably an extension and enlargement of the care provider role rather than a shift of responsibility from care professional to families and communities. A new energised relationship, which sees professionals and citizens, carers and third sector as partners in meeting care needs, will make sure that the unpaid workforce is both valued and enabled as a resource for care.
This has implications for the current scope of practice for professional roles in health and care, and for extending expertise into developing enabling and coaching approaches and methods to liberate the often frozen assets of communities and those accessing services, trapped in the dependency culture of a professionalised care model.
Asset-based approaches to working with communities and the critical role of volunteers and carers will require strengthening. This will have implications for commissioning as well as learning and development.
Investing in Volunteers (IiV) is the UK quality standard for all organisations which involve volunteers in their work. If you want to ensure that your volunteer management structure is adhering to current good practice then this is the quality standard for you.
Volunteer Scotland is Scotland’s national centre for volunteering and is doing some great work in helping organisations and communities more generally to reshape and reinvent our notion of volunteering to support care. They offer training, resources and facilitated workshops for Health and Social Care Partnerships who want to explore the role volunteering can play in care.
The Equal Partners in Care (EPiC) national framework supports the health and social care workforce to be more aware of carers and to work in partnership with them.
Volunteer Scotland offers a comprehensive range of programmes in practical training around volunteer management and leadership in volunteer training.
Asset-based community development approaches – for example, this useful handout form ‘Altogether Better’ has further ideas.
Timebanking – developed by Edgar Cahn as a way for communities to exchange skills and assets to build community and create non-monetary approaches to trade.
Asset-based co-design – a useful paper and toolkit from the Glasgow Centre for Population Health.
Volunteering in health and care – a useful guide to the role of volunteers and implications for commissioners and care professionals. It looks at the important part that volunteers play in improving patient experience, addressing health inequalities, and building a closer relationship between services and communities.
Planning for the future by the Scottish Social Services Council is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Based on a work at http://learn.sssc.uk.com.