Volunteering with us

Why volunteer with us 

Healthwatch can have a real impact on peoples lives across the country. With your support, we can make a difference in shaping health and social care services for today and for the future.

Volunteering is a great way for you to meet people, gain new skills and experiences along with boosting your CV. 

Some of the key benefits to volunteering: 

• Help influence better health and social care services for residents within the Wigan borough
• Make a positive difference within your local community
• Feel valued, empowered and part of our team
• Meet new people and make new friends within our volunteer network 
• Boost your confidence and self-esteem - we work in an inclusive environment
• Improve your health, well-being and quality of life
• Use your experience and skills to support our organisation 
• Build your skills and knowledge around health and social care 
• Gain valuable work experience to help boost your CV 

Our roles can be very flexible to suit you. We’re inclusive and want people from every part of our community to volunteer with us.

We have a dedicated staff team who will listen to what you want to get out of volunteering to see if we have a role that is suitable to you.

Volunteer roles

Our volunteers work in many different roles, when it comes to volunteering we understand that it is not a 'one size fits all' approach. Below are some examples of the responsibilities that our volunteers have within their role. 

Healthwatchers

Healthwatchers are our eyes and ears in the community. We’re recruiting ‘Healthwatchers’ to make sure we are finding out as much about public opinion as we can. We need volunteers to go out in to their communities and talk to their family and friends to gather comments about their experience of using health and social care services. We want to hear about things that are good and things which could be better.

Healthwatch Community Champions

Based within community groups to promote Healthwatch by distributing our material and leaflets and encourage a wide variety of people to feed in heir views about the health and social care services they use. To encourage people to attend focus groups, complete feedback forms and surveys. To tell Healthwatch what the public has told you, so Healthwatch can take action to improve health and care quality locally.

Authorised Representative Role 

To enter and view health and social care services and to report back observations to Healthwatch. Healthwatch has an important statutory power that entitles authorised representative volunteers to enter and view health and social care services as they are being delivered and to then report back on them.