Baroness Julia Neuberger, the government’s ‘volunteering champion’ has published a new report which has determined that there is potential to expand volunteering in health and social care to build more “people centred services”.

The report Volunteering in the Public Services: Health and Social Care consulted with over 1,000 volunteers and organisations. It identified what it described as a largely untapped source of volunteers in service-users, arguing that they would make ideal volunteers as they had been through the given circumstances themselves.

Baroness Neuberger said: “Volunteering can create a virtuous circle, improving levels of well being for volunteers, professional colleagues and most importantly the people that use the services. In health and social care I found some excellent examples of volunteers being involved in services as well as significant potential to increase levels of volunteering in the sector.”

Health secretary Alan Johnson said he would consider the report’s recommendations to inform his department’s Voluntary Strategy for Health and Social Care which would “drive forward and promote new and existing volunteering initiatives across the NHS, social care and in the third sector”.

The report’s main recommendations were:

- In-house ‘volunteering hubs’ should be established within government agencies to help mainstream volunteering in health and social care services.

- When commissioning services, government agencies should consider the social benefits and true costs of volunteering.

- Employee volunteering schemes should become commonplace throughout health and social care services.

- A programme board should be set up, with a remit to increase volunteering in health and social care and ensure that volunteers are properly managed.

- Both the government and charities need to make more of the huge, largely untapped, resource of service-users as volunteers.

- NHS websites should signpost their users to peer group support websites, and to more general volunteering opportunities.