The Sleep Apnoea Trust/OSA Alliance Volunteering Project (sponsored by SEFAM)
by Sleep Apnoea Trust
The OSA Alliance is an umbrella organisation whose objective is to facilitate collaboration between experts across UK patient and professional sleep organisations. The Group’s remit focuses specifically on obstructive sleep apnoea, and its mission is to work towards facilitating excellence in OSA-related care, research, education & training, workforce, equipment and resources. The Sleep Apnoea Trust is a patient-led Charity who are a member of the OSA Alliance.
One of the aims of the OSA Alliance is to encourage more resources for sleep services. While the Group believes that this should be achieved through increased numbers of trained staff (and improved funding); it recognises that alleviation of the pressure on staff, particularly those running the sleep clinics, could be achieved by generating more volunteers to support sleep services in NHS hospitals.
The volunteering programme in the Sleep Clinic at Great Western Hospital in Swindon was highlighted to us as an example of good practice. The Voluntary Services Manager, Vickie Hayes and Sleep Specialist Lead Nurse Sam Backway provided us with an insight on the scheme they run: the recruitment process, the mandatory training and management of the volunteers in the Sleep Clinic. Of course there needs to be clear boundaries in place, but providing these are set up in advance through the training and induction process, we believe that volunteers have a valuable contribution to make. Vickie and Sam’s full interviews, along with one of their long term ex-patient volunteers Richard, can be viewed on the Sleep Apnoea Trust’s Volunteering webpage – link is shown below.
https://sleep-apnoea-trust.org/get-involved/volunteering/
While many people do volunteer their time to work in hospitals across the UK, we get the sense that sleep isn’t an obvious area for many volunteers. However, the Sleep Apnoea Trust (SATA), one of our member organisations, has a membership of 1400 patients who are both familiar with sleep clinics in general and OSA in particular.
By sign-posting the opportunity to SATA members, there is a win-win for both the member and their local sleep centre. We are running an awareness programme with SATA membership and the wider patient community; one of our stakeholders Hope2Sleep has also shared the project with their members. This will both raise the profile of the opportunities that volunteering brings, highlight what it entails and encourage these members to volunteer at their local sleep clinic.
At the same time, we hope that sleep clinics across the UK will be able to benefit from volunteers in the same way as Great Western Hospital has.
We have also produced a leaflet aimed at patients and sleep professionals on volunteering.
QR Code Link to SATA leaflets:
This project has been shared with Sleep Professionals at the ARTP Conference in Harrogate (April 2024), and the BTS Conference (June 2024), and more recently NHS England’s Volunteer Partnerships Manager has been working on promoting placements in Sleep Clinics as part of their network.
A template job description has been written which can be shared and adapted for use by individual Sleep Clinics, it lists the types of duties volunteers can assist with and these range from Sending Out Diagnostic kits, Equipment spares, to putting new patient packs together, leaving Sleep Clinic Staff more time to concentrate on the patient centred work.
If your Sleep Team are interested in having a volunteer working within your Sleep Clinic please email: louise.mather@sleep-apnoea-trust.org
Sam Backway (right in picture below) from Great Western told us in her interview “Volunteers make a significant contribution to enhancing patient services within the NHS whether this is keeping patient cups topped up with tea, or supporting some of the administration duties to ensure that sleep services teams can focus on patient care”.
