Volunteer Service Agreement
Here at King’s we are grateful to the thousands of volunteers who support us each year to improve patient and visitor experience. We have come to recognise the most common traits in our brilliant volunteers, these are individuals are consistent, independent and proactive, and we seek these traits in new volunteers too.
Whilst we appreciate people have varying offers of time commitment our expectations are a minimum of 2 hours depending on placement per week and that is at the same time each week for 6 months.
You must be 16 and over to volunteer. With those under 18 whilst we ask for a parental consent form, we strongly encourage you to apply and progress through independently so that you can demonstrate your independence before starting and we can understand your own personality and character.
We can only communicate with those applying and are unable to discuss the application with anyone else including parents or guardians. Please ensure that contact details are that of the applicant only.
The recruitment and training process should take under a month and those who exhibit the traits mentioned earlier have completed it in 5 days.
Whilst we will support in securing a placement for you, you will need to engage with your placement area team going forward, seeking them out at the start of each shift to understand what you can do to support.
We understand people have other commitments, so we ask that you consider whether you are able to accommodate volunteering as well. Please investigate how long the commute will be to and from your home and whether you can reasonably travel that length of time each week. We also want you to consider what it will be like in a hospital environment, King’s is one of the UK’s largest acute hospitals and a major trauma centre for London and the SE and some patient accidents may be highly distressing to observe.
A volunteer’s primary mission is to improve patient experience. Primarily this is done through patient engagement. At times areas are extremely busy while at other times, the end of the day on an elderly care ward for instance, placements can be very quiet. At these times, you are requested to deploy some independent pro-activity to seek out tasks to support your placement area team ahead of the next busy period.
References are available, however, please be aware that we will not be able to provide a reference with less than 60 hours of volunteering accrued. For those applying to support a UCAS application do not apply seeking a reference with less than 4 months before your reference is due.
We understand volunteering may not be right for everyone so we encourage you to think very seriously before applying and to please let us know at any stage, if you are not able to continue. Please be aware that even though you are volunteering and not in a paid role should you not comply with hospital policies this will result in your volunteering role ending at King’s.
In order to volunteer safely with us we have to be able to contact you by email, post or phone. All information we store on our volunteer database is strictly confidential and not shared with any external agencies, except in the case of emergency when this may be necessary. Personal data will be processed in a manner compliant with the Information Commissioner's Office and General Data Protection Regulation.
Please indicate you have read and understood the above by ticking the checkbox before starting your application form.
