Celebrating Volunteers' Week 2023

Welcome to Volunteers’ Week 2023!

Volunteers’ Week is an annual celebration of volunteering and is a great chance to recognise all the amazing things that volunteers do across the country and worldwide.  The theme for 2023 is Celebration and Inspiration and we will be taking the opportunity this week to showcase how volunteers are really making a difference to Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust.

At present, the Trust has over 150 volunteers supporting patients, teams and projects across our wide geography and that doesn’t include all the partnership volunteers involved through their own organisations, like Barnardos supporting CAMHS in Bucks, the Oxford Mental Health Partnership supporting mental health services and the League of Friends fundraisers supporting Community Hospitals in Oxfordshire and teams from TWIGS supporting CAMHS in Swindon. 

Trust volunteers get involved with a wide variety of activities including – befriending on wards, visiting with their pets, pastoral care with the chaplaincy team, peer support, gardening, arts activities and supporting patient groups.  The teams who receive support from volunteers really appreciate the time and energy that they bring to the service and over the week we will be sharing with you some case studies, quotes and key information about how volunteering supports the Trust and Oxford Health Charity projects.

“Head of Charity and Involvement, Julie Pink, who has been involved in volunteer programme development for almost 20 years, says: 'I would like to wish all our volunteers a ‘Happy Volunteers’ Week’ and say a heartfelt thank you for all the care, commitment, time, energy and enthusiasm that you bring into the Trust.  One of the elements of volunteering that inspires me the most, especially in our Trust, is the way in which volunteers bring the community into the services they support – creating social interactions that boost mood, increase well-being and remind us to take some time for each other.'”