Healthwatch Swindon Volunteers Awarded Room to Reward Short Break
In 2019 The Care Forum became a partner charity with Room to Reward, a young charity bringing the hospitality and charity sectors together, to recognise the hard work carried out by volunteers.
The aim of the Room to Reward scheme is for hotels to sign up and donate their unsold rooms as short breaks for free to charities and community groups. Each year the partner charities who are part of the scheme can then nominate volunteers to receive an award.
To qualify for an award volunteers need to be with an organisation for a minimum of 12 months. This year we nominated three of our volunteers and we're delighted to announce that all three were successful and will be going on a short break of their choice.
The nominees
Steve Barnes who is a Trustee at The Care Forum, as well as a Healthwatch volunteer himself, presented the awards to our volunteers who were nominated:
Norma Thompson
A crucial part of the volunteer team work that Norma is so great at getting involved with are our 'Enter and View' visits. We go tot NHS and social care funded services to observe and write a report about our findings following on from our visit and give any recommendations for ways the service could be improved.
Norma is an authorised representative for 'Enter and Views' and has been fantastic at looking at the services we visit from a lay perspective.
She is a great team player and an asset to us in many other ways as well.
Nazma Ramruttun
Nazma’s commitment and contribution to our volunteer team, which includes getting involved with the promotion and completion of our feedback forms. Without our volunteers to gather the feedback from the general public we would not be able to deliver on our project.
Nazma has been a trailblazer for us and fantastic at gathering and completing these forms at events, as well as at NHS services we visited throughout the last year.
Mark Court
Mark volunteers with us through our partnership with Swindon Advocacy Movement. He joined us to help improve services for people with learning disabilities, as well as to learn new skills.
We provided Mark with support and training to become a 'Quality Checke'r as part of our 'Enter and View' visits.
Since then Mark has also given a PowerPoint presentation about the work he had done with us at The Care Forum AGM in 2019. Mark did an excellent job and has been a consistently reliable ambassador for Swindon Advocacy Movement and a great example of partnership working.
If you want to find out more about volunteering and the ways in which you can help speak to our Volunteer Support Officer, Sam Baker.
