Churches

You will need a minimum of two volunteers on the Someone Cares team. This is because pastoral visiting is much easier in pairs! A larger team means more pastoral visits per week, but one visiting session will still bring care and hope into the lives of individuals.

There are also roles ‘behind the scenes’ for aspects such as providing items of practical love into the hospital and for coordinating church-wide prayer support.

One volunteer will need to act as the project lead and will be responsible for locally coordinating the project, overseeing volunteers and for communicating with Someone Cares UK Hub.

We suggest that pastoral visiting volunteers commit one half day a week to hospital visiting.  Volunteers must also be able to commit to training/support sessions every couple of months.  Some of these will be local and some will be provided online by Someone Cares UK Hub. The ‘behind the scene’ roles of coordinating the provision of practical items and coordinating prayer require a lot less of a time commitment.

The team leader role requires additional time spent managing the team, implementing local training (with guidance) and communicating with Someone Cares UK Hub. This is likely to add up to a couple of hours a month.

The involvement of the whole church congregation is an integral and exciting part of running a Someone Cares project!  

Prayer – We ask for the church to commit to praying regularly for the hospital, the staff and for the patients. We will help you set up a prayer network so that wider prayer can be provided for individuals in the hospital at their request. In our experience, church members love to pray for situations within the hospital.

Skills and resources – Your congregation owns a unique and varied skill set and it is wonderful that everyone can help in some way. Our first project has seen chaplains ask for support with everything from graphic design to laminating large numbers of posters and we have a lady in her eighties who irons donated pyjamas for use in the emergency department! As shared experience is so powerful, Someone Cares also provides an opportunity for those in your congregation who may themselves live with health challenges to serve others in a meaningful way.

Meeting need through church-based community projects – Our hope is that your Someone Cares project will lead to the local church working alongside overstretched NHS services to support individuals. Maybe you have a community cafe, debt advice service or food bank that patients could be directed to? Or maybe you could form a list of church-based community projects within the local area for the chaplains to utilise?  

Ongoing support after discharge – As the Someone Cares pastoral visiting volunteers are rooted in a local church, there is scope for ongoing relationship and pastoral support to continue through via church following discharge. Having met Someone Cares volunteers whilst in hospital, individuals may want to start attending some of your community projects or your church cafe or join you for church services.

We can currently help you supply emergency toiletry care packs into your local hospital. We will also help you create the flyers to place within these packs to link recipients with the hospital chaplaincy services plus your own church website and Someone Cares resources. These packs meet a practical need and also provide an invaluable link with chaplaincy services within the hospital at the point of admission.  

We can also assist you in putting together resources that the hospital requests – for example, our first project asked Someone Cares to provide children’s pyjamas for use in the emergency department.

There will be a lot to do as you start your project, but having done it before we can support you in this! We will help you form links with the chaplaincy team and will provide information for the chaplains about Someone Cares. We will support you in selecting and training up a team of pastoral visiting volunteers and will provide initial training. Whilst your volunteers are going through the application procedures at your local hospital, we will help you establish the ways in which your church can provide loving support into the hospital – for example through prayer, practical items, pastoral resources and links to other services. We will also help you set up the infrastructure needed for a project to run smoothly, from stock monitoring systems to web page development.

Once your project is up and running we will continue to support you through team leader catch-ups, regular volunteer training and support sessions, keeping you up to date with chaplaincy news and developments and our ever growing library of resources for hospital chaplaincy use.

We want to reassure chaplains that teams of Someone Cares volunteers are well-informed, suitable for the role and equipped to carry out the role sensitively and in keeping with NHS chaplaincy guidelines. It is important to note that this role is a ministry of loving others, not a healing or evangelistic ministry. We will teach your volunteers what chaplaincy is (and isn’t) within the context of the NHS and will provide training on how to have conversations about difficult situations and how to look after their own emotional wellbeing.

Your volunteers will also have to go through the volunteer recruitment procedures at your local hospital. These will likely include an application form, a DBS check, occupational health checks and mandatory training in areas such as infection control.

Volunteers will be required to attend regular training and support sessions through Someone Cares. Some of these will be provided regionally online and you will be expected to provide a number of local team sessions too (with guidance). We will also ensure that you are kept up to date with national hospital chaplaincy news and developments.

We are currently looking for pilot projects. These pilot projects will receive the initial set-up support for free and the first 12 months of subscription for free too. After the first 12 months, the monthly subscription fee will be required moving forward. Please use the ‘Contact us’ button to get in touch if you’d like to be a pilot project!

For non-pilot projects, there will be a one-off cost of around £200 for the initial training and support provided as you set up your project. There will then be a monthly subscription to Someone Cares of around £25 per calendar month.

There are local costs involved if your church would like to offer practical items such as toiletry care packs. We would encourage you to provide items such as these, but the budget you set for this is up to you. We can give you estimated figures for this before you commit to running a project.