How To Get Involved With Hospice
What is a "hospice volunteer"?
A hospice volunteer is someone who donates their time to their local hospice. There are many different ways to do this. It can be through direct patient care, where you're really interacting with patients or families. Many times, volunteering at a hospice can be helping with the administrative side and paperwork. It can be going in and playing piano for the patients on a Sunday afternoon, or serving tea. One of the things that's great about hospice and volunteering: they want to know what your talents are and how they can utilize them to make a difference in their patients' lives.
What kind of training does a hospice volunteer undergo?
Hospices usually have a set of training guidelines for volunteers and they're very good about understanding you're giving your time so they want to make sure that volunteers are trained and comfortable in the environment whether it's in a patient's home or a hospice unit or other facility. So hospices will have a training programme that's usually at a convenient time for volunteers to go and learn the ins and outs and help you get comfortable with this type of volunteering. You'll find you end up getting more than you give volunteering in a hospice.
What type of activities does a hospice volunteer do?
Hospice volunteers do a wide variety of activities. There's of course interacting directly with the families, but there's also a lot of things behind the scenes with different events that hospice has, and different groups that they run. There are a lot of logistical things that go on with hospice, and volunteers can be a very important part of those activities. There are also some very unusual things that volunteers can do. If you're great at making cakes, believe me, families can use something special like that during hard times. If you're really wonderful at writing, maybe people might want a letter dictated to their daughter to be opened on her wedding day. You never know how your talents will be used or what activities there may be that you can help with.
