Volunteer Spotlight: A rapport with patients
4th June, 2025
Barbara told us about her experience as a remote volunteer, making reminder calls to help ensure patients have the information they need.
I’ve been volunteering with Friends since 2020. Before that, I had been volunteering at a local eye clinic that closed. I was looking around for something similar and found Friends of Moorfields.
I expected to be an ‘in-clinic’ volunteer, but just as I finished my volunteer training, Covid hit and I was asked if I would like to work from home as a phone volunteer. I’ve been doing it ever since.
The phone call service was created during lockdown. We called patients to help reassure them about safety measures and let them know what to expect ahead of their essential in-person appointments. Now we call with appointment reminders and other helpful information.
I do two phone call sessions a week from home, usually for the injection clinics at City Road. Each session lasts about 1 to 1½ hours depending on how long the list is and how chatty patients are. I check whether patients can attend their appointments in a few days’ time, and feed this back to the Friends of Moorfields staff team, who in turn send the responses to the relevant clinic. This helps reduce the number of patients that miss their appointment, saving time and effort for both staff and patients.
It is not my role to give advice, but I can and do feed back relevant information from patients – for example a request for a translator for someone who doesn’t speak English.
Sometimes patients just want to have a chat and, within reason, this is fine. I like interacting with people. It’s important to quickly develop a rapport with patients – especially when they are wary of unsolicited, anonymous calls. Most are very appreciative, once they know why I’m calling.
I am still torn between volunteering in person – I quite like the possibility of moving to a handholding role – and continuing with being part of the phone call team. At some point, I want to arrange to shadow one of the volunteers at Moorfields at Stratford to get a clearer idea of what they do. The bottom line is, I can see the benefit for me in both roles, but what I really want is to be where I’m most needed.