The following are important tips to consider when starting a Health TAPESTRY volunteer program:

• Clearly outline the scope of the volunteer role
• Ensure you have a volunteer coordinator with appropriate qualifications and experience
• Establish geographical boundaries for your volunteer recruitment efforts, as volunteers spread over vast distances will create limitations and barriers to effective delivery of services
• Ensure volunteers are well informed of policies and procedures that govern their work. Policies and procedures should address issues such as privacy and confidentiality, occupational health and safety, as well as an assessment of risk and minimization of potentially adverse situations that may be encountered during a home visit
• Develop an evaluation process for volunteer management (e.g. communication and feedback)
• Ensure you have the adequate budget and resources to support the volunteer workforce.

Learnings from the Hamilton site

In the first implementation of Health TAPESTRY in the Hamilton site, a number of learnings were tracked, which led to the development of best practices. Click here for the published volunteer program description. In order to streamline the processes of the volunteer program, it was decided that:

• Volunteers call the patients they work with “clients”. The term better reflects the differences between community volunteers and clinicians.
• The surveys are presented in the TAP-App using a specific order to assist with comfort and relationship building. For example, the Daily Life Activities survey appears first so the client and volunteers can get comfortable with each other. The Goal Setting questions appear at the end so that responses to previous questions can be considered in the selection of goals.
• The volunteer is also prompted with a series of questions for them to complete privately after the session, to provide additional information to the clinical team. This is an important component that is relatively unique in this program, as it gives clinicians the perspective of a community volunteer within the clients own home.
• Since the regularity of visits helps to build trust and good working relationships between clients and volunteers, the maximum time between home visits is capped at four weeks. Ideally, visits are booked under two weeks apart.