Working With the Elderly

Dozens of charitable and voluntary organisations across the UK support elderly people in a wide variety of ways ranging from informal contact through to literally life-saving daily visits. The volunteers who work with the elderly are as varied as the roles available to them.

Visits And Activity Volunteering

Age can bring its own problems, including reduced mobility owing to ill health or frailty – this means that older people easily become isolated and trapped in their own homes, so volunteers visit them to ensure that they stay in touch with the rest of the community. Over time, previously home-bound elderly people may become able to make trips to clubs or events specially organised for older people, but at first it can simply be enough for them to receive a visit and some communication from the outside world. Volunteers going to somebody’s home will need to pass CRB checks and will probably be given training on how to manage ‘outreach activities’ – these can be as simple as playing draughts or helping clean out a cupboard through to helping an older person fill in forms or write letters.

It’s important to remember that the elderly are vulnerable too and that it’s vital to be sensitive to their feelings and fears.

Volunteering In A Residential Or Care Home

Many care facilities welcome visits from volunteers, especially to those residents who no longer have family members who visit them. This kind of volunteering is normally more structure than home visits, and may include working as a team that organises musical or art activities or performing such tasks as reading aloud, helping with hobbies or just walking around the garden with an older person who has balance or mobility issues.

Some volunteer groups encourage young people, children and even pet owners to visit residential homes so that the elderly inhabitants are given a chance to hold a rabbit or play with a dog, talk to children about their own childhood or work with teenagers to create local history resources. This kind of volunteering can be deeply rewarding but may also expose the volunteer to more troubling ‘elder’ behaviour that results from dementia, Alzheimer’s disease or simply from having spent many years in an institution without visitors. This may mean that volunteers hear tales of depression and loneliness and most organisations that provide volunteers in such circumstances ensure they have a debriefing system to give their volunteers a chance to unburden themselves emotionally on a regular basis.

Memory Volunteers

A very specialised form of volunteering is the memory volunteer who sits with an older person and encourages them to explore their past. This may involve taking notes of family history, looking at old photos or providing prompts such as old books and newspapers, or music, that may prompt recollections. Some older people may be unresponsive at the beginning of such activities and a volunteer has to overcome their own disappointment and continue to talk about ‘the good old days’ in the hope that something they say will trigger a response. Often this treatment is offered to senile patients who turn out to have excellent access to childhood memories despite being unable to remember much of their later lives. There is always training offered for this kind of volunteering and the charities that undertake it often have ‘memory packs’ based on each decade of the past, to help a volunteer instigate the retrieval of memories.