The volunteer worker and the psychiatric hospital.

Abstract

602 The purpose of this brief paper is to outline some basic thinking and planning for the effective utilization of volunteer assistance in programs for patients in hospitals. It is proposed, in the general discussion to follow the presentation of the paper, to emphasize various aspects of this thinking and planning that apply more specifically perhaps to hospitals in which there is a predominance of psychiatric patients. Irrespective, however, of the type of hospital concerned, there are certain principles that hospital management and staff, as well as the volunteer hospital workers, must fully understand and observe if the volunteer program is to be truly meaningful and helpful to the patients, to the hospital management and staff, and to the volunteers who participate. Any other kind of volunteer program has no place in a hospital program. The volunteer participation of citizens of the community in programs for hospitalized patients is not new. Volunteers-both men and women-have been assisting in various phases of hospital activities for many years. Within recent years, however, there has come to be a fuller realization on the part of both lay and professional hospital staff that this volunteer effort represents an extremely important potential, in the first place, of direct assistance in augmenting certain of their programs in the care and treatment of patients and, in the second place, of indirect assistance in further establishing the hospital as part-and-parcel of the thinking and living of the community.