Red Cross Blogs

Help! (I need ten bodies)

By Jim Griffin
July 23, 2009 at 12:43 pm

This will be the first of many blog entries to open with an apology for the delay in posting due to workload colossalism. It’d help me out if you could find it charming. And forgive the occasionally made up word like ‘colossalism’. The reason for the delay this week: volunteer crisis strikes medical equipment department in Glasgow!

We’re absolutely storming away in medical equipment at the moment. We’re open five days a week, delivering to people’s doors three times a week and generating healthy-looking donations to support the service. Last month we helped 144 people by loaning them wheelchairs, commodes and high back chairs. That’s an increase of about 50% on this time last year which is absolutely fantastic.

What’s less fantastic is that our volunteer workforce hasn’t increased by 50% to cope with the demand so our loyal bunch of med loaners are flagging. Understandably so. It can be quite demanding, answering calls, cleaning and allocating equipment, issuing and demonstrating equipment, building delivery schedules for the drivers and completing the paperwork that goes along with it all. When you’re the only volunteer on shift, panic and chaos and exhaustion are constant threats. Our team is staying just the right side of those threats but good as they are they won’t be able to hold out forever.

The solution is volunteer recruitment. We need ten new volunteers: four to work the desk taking calls from service users, four in the back rooms cleaning and maintaining the wheelchairs and two to hit the road in the delivery van. We need them fast.

With the help of our volunteering advisor we’ve updated the local volunteer centre which will send people our way. With the help of our natural funk and effortless cool we’ve posted on Gumtree. And with the help of our press officer and her volunteers we’ll have the local press running stories on our need for help. We’ve already had three people express an interest. I’ll interview them early next week.

So reinforcements are on the way, bringing with them a relief so huge it’s practically the dictionary definition of ‘colossalism’.

Image: © Bob Johns

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Comments (5) »

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Tags: care products, Glasgow, Health and social care, homecare, Inverclyde, Lanarkshire, mobility, Renfrewshire, volunteer

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 at 12:43 pm and is filed under Health and social care. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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