MAHMUDA KHANUM never imagined she would land a job in the NHS after working for a debt collection company for years.
The 35-year-old from Manningham says: “If it wasn’t for Volunteer to Career, I wouldn’t be anywhere close to working in healthcare - I just wouldn’t have seen it as a career path open to me.”
Aged 14, Mahmuda’s parents took her out of school in Bradford and moved her to Bangladesh for four years. “Parents would worry about the kind of exposure their daughters would have in the UK in their teenage years, so it was acceptable practice to send them to Bangladesh,” she says.
In Bangladesh, Mahmuda studied Islamic Studies and Languages but returning to the UK aged 18, she found herself at a disadvantage looking for work. “I didn’t have any GCSEs. Whenever I applied for a job they asked about qualifications. It limited my choices,” she recalls. “Eventually I secured a role in a debt collection company, but it was more a case of ‘needs must’.”
After getting married and having two children, Mahmuda studied at night classes for the GCSEs she’d missed out on. With an interest in healthcare, she discovered Helpforce’s Volunteer to Career programme - which helps people transition from volunteering roles to frontline healthcare careers.
“It sounded like a great way to get a taste of working in health. I signed up for a couple of hours a week,” says Mahumda, who started volunteering at a baby clinic, weighing and measuring babies and interacting with the mothers.
“I loved it. The nurses I was supporting were really encouraging and helped develop my confidence. I felt like part of the team.”
Mahmuda was particularly interested in referrals to dietetic services, for babies who weren’t putting on sufficient weight. Having completing a Level 3 access course at college, she’s in her final year of a dietetics degree at Leeds Beckett University and on a placement at Leeds Children’s Hospital. When she graduates, she’s set on a career as a paediatric dietician.
EUNICE SOMADE, 51, loved her job at Lagos University Teaching Hospital but was living in fear. She came to the UK in 2022 and thanks to the Volunteer to Career scheme she’s now applying her 27 years’ nursing experience to caring for the elderly as a hospital staff nurse.
Eunice, of Allerton, was an Assistant Director of Nursing in Lagos when she and husband Taofeek decided to make a new life in the UK with their children. Says Eunice: “It wasn’t a safe place to bring up a family. In Nigeria there was always violence, kidnappings, threats. We wanted to be somewhere we could walk down the street without being scared.”
When Eunice resigned from her high-level role, she knew that despite her experience across many aspects of healthcare, she needed to be equipped to work in the NHS. After applying for the Volunteer to Career scheme run by Bradford District Care NHS Foundation Trust, she was taken on as a volunteer in the baby clinic at Westbourne Green Community Hospital.
It enabled her to put into practice the skills she’d acquired in Nigeria while finding out about NHS systems, policies and standards. She also studied for OSCE exams giving her the license to work as a nurse in the UK.
Now Eunice is a staff nurse caring for the elderly and delighted to be getting her career back on track. “Volunteer to Career was a great way to get a foot in the door and experience healthcare in this country,” she says. “At my interview they seemed impressed with my nursing experience and that I had immersed myself in the NHS through volunteering.”
Volunteer to Career, piloted by national charity Helpforce working with 48 NHS organisations, including Bradford District Care NHS Foundation Trust, supports people securing jobs including healthcare assistants, mental health support workers and assistant physiotherapists. Among those moving into employment are former members of the armed forces community, refugees, over-50s and single parents.
Now Helpforce is urging the Government to explore ramping up investment in the initiative as part of its NHS 10-Year Health Plan, insisting it has potential to fill around 23,600 frontline healthcare job vacancies and study placements in England by the end of the current Parliament.
Helpforce Chief Executive Amerjit Chohan says: “The success of Volunteer to Career to date has been significant. Together with our partners in NHS Trusts and other organisations, we’ve helped people who are interested in healthcare careers but don’t have a background in the field to gain valuable experience before applying for paid roles.
"Through structured pathways, volunteers can find their niche without the immediate pressure of employment, while being upskilled and given confidence to take into job interviews.
"Since we launched the pilot in 2022, hundreds of people have taken part, with 55per cent successfully transitioning from volunteering to careers in healthcare or courses such as nursing and midwifery.
"With the right investment, there’s clear potential to supersize the opportunity, with conservative capacity for each of the 215 NHS trusts in England to support an average of 50 volunteers annually. We urge the Government to consider Volunteer to Career expansion within its upcoming NHS 10-Year Health Plan, unleashing the potential of home-grown healthcare talent.”
Sarah Woolnough, Chief Executive of the King’s Fund, said: “At a time when the NHS is severely stretched and tackling chronic workforce shortages, Helpforce is doing excellent, innovative work to support volunteers to explore opportunities for an NHS career. To implement Volunteer to Career on a mass scale would require strategic investment in volunteer managers across NHS Trusts, but such investment would likely be cost-effective when set against paying high fees to agencies that supply temporary staff and helping to reduce the health service’s reliance on recruiting large numbers of healthcare staff from overseas.”
Catherine Jowitt, Head of Charity and Volunteering at Bradford District Care NHS Foundation Trust, says: “As Mahmuda and Eunice’s stories illustrate, Volunteer to Career is an effective way of opening up healthcare career opportunities to people with different backgrounds and life experiences, or no prior experience. We’re delighted to have partnered with Helpforce on the initiative.”
