Volunteer

The Voluntary Services Team is supported by Sheffield Hospitals Charity.

We have around 300 active volunteers, aged from 16 to 80+ across 4 hospital sites. Our volunteers reflect the diversity of the Sheffield region, being from many different walks of life. What they all have in common is that they want to dedicate some time to helping others.

Volunteers who join the team do so for a variety of reasons including a desire to help others, to give back to the NHS after a personal experience, as a way to fill their spare time or to get experience for a future career.

STH volunteers help to improve the experiences of patients and visitors. Our volunteers tell us how rewarding they find their volunteering experience, as it gives them the opportunity to learn new skills, meet new people and give something back to the hospitals.

Support us

The work of the Voluntary Services Team at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals is generously supported by Sheffield Hospitals Charity.

If you would like to know more about Sheffield Hospitals Charity and the work they do, become a volunteer with the Charity itself or if you would like to make a donation, please visit their website

We offer a variety of volunteer roles.  All are non-clinical and enhance the patient experience as well as supporting the work of STH paid staff. For our general recruitment, applicants must be 18 or over. See below for information about youth volunteering.

We are not able to provide one-off volunteer roles in specific specialist areas and we do not offer work placements.

Examples of the roles we offer include;

  • Active Response Volunteers – an on-call service to respond to help required across the hospital site
  • Outpatient volunteers – assisting patients with checking in for their appointments, providing refreshments and conversation
  • Pharmacy Runners - delivering medication to wards
  • Ward Activities volunteers - who provide a welcome distraction for patients with arts and crafts and more
  • Welcomer Volunteers – providing a friendly greeting to patients and visitors and helping them find their way around our sites
  • Plus many more!

Each autumn we recruit young people to our youth volunteering programme called Team Impact.

If you are aged 16-17 please look out for advertisements for this programme via your school or college, or contact us for more information. 

The Volunteers Team will provide you with a main contact for your volunteering placement, one of our Volunteer Coordinators.

They will be in touch with your regularly, including meeting with you to review your volunteering after the initial 6 weeks and then every 6 months.

You can contact them about any problems or issues that have arisen, or if you cannot attend your shift or need to take a break.

Active volunteers will be invited to celebration events each year, our chance to say thank you.

We work with a number of external partners and internal departments who offer volunteering roles in specialist areas.

If you are interested in any of the following you can get in touch and we will put you in contact with the relevant person.

For these roles, the individual department or organisation will manage and support you day to day but you will go through initial recruitment checks and mandatory training via the central STH Volunteers Team as you will be volunteering on the hospital site.

  • Chaplaincy volunteers- provide pastoral support for patients in hospital.
  • Conversation Partner volunteers - with Speech and Language team - help stroke survivors practise conversation in their own homes.
  • History Group volunteers - research, maintain and communicate an archive of the hospital’s history.
  • Horatio’s Garden volunteers – maintain the garden at the spinal injuries unit and assist with patient activities. 
  • Hospital Radio volunteers – broadcast music and information to patients and take patient requests, fundraise and manage technical aspects of radio station.
  • Sexual Health Sheffield volunteers - provide advice to patients in communities on sexual health matters. 
  • Sheffield Open Heart Club volunteers - offer peer support to those undergoing heart surgery.
  • MESMAC volunteers - peer support for patients living with HIV. 
  • Weston Park Cancer Charity volunteers - support for patients at their information centre and at the Weston Park Transport Hub.