Home from Hospital with the help of Good Neighbours 

A Good Neighbour representative from an East Suffolk scheme writes: 

'Over 3 weeks - 3rd-21st February, our volunteers visited a lady 5 times a week- we offered weekends as well but she had family and friends helping then. This lady is normally very independent and always out and about in the village. Unfortunately, she had a fall outdoors on a hard surface, broke her collar bone and cracked several ribs. She was in hospital about a week and her immediate neighbour, also one of our volunteers, told her about our scheme and the help available on her discharge. We did an assessment a couple of days after she returned home and we were able to sort out some help at short notice- most volunteers were able to commit to the same day each week and they phoned her before the visit to confirm a time and to see if she needed any shopping etc. taking in.

They did jobs like tidying up, hoovering, reaching things at a high level, washing in or out of the machine etc., but the main benefit was social- a cup of tea and a chat, as this lady wasn’t used to spending time indoors alone.  I visited to see how it was going and the lady expressed huge delight and thanks for all the help. She thought the support was excellent, so much so that she now wants to join us as a volunteer when she’s fully recovered- a win win! I’m seeing her next week to give her our feedback form.' Many GNS across Suffolk support their parish residents with volunteer delivered transport to medical and other essential services, and where needed additional accompanying support to help access their medical appointments. Last year 13 of our Suffolk GNS reported providing 1677 transport assistance tasks to support service users access health and other essential services, at present we now have 35 community organisations as part of our Suffolk Good Neighbour Scheme Network. 

Our Good Neighbour Schemes help residents with a plethora of requests for support, as our East Suffolk scheme demonstrates above and as we’ve heard from other schemes, there can be a lot to think about when supporting someone to return home from hospital, and indeed a lot of schemes recognise the importance of supporting older and vulnerable residents to prevent them from becoming unwell and being admitted to hospital in the first place.  From getting in shopping, cleaning out the fridge and restocking it to ensure people are accessing healthy food to eat, providing transport or support to access medical services, helping to tidy around the home for return home, or volunteers visiting service users while in hospital to make sure they have the support in place for when they are discharged, and encouraging attendance to social events, to helping prevent people becoming lonely, isolated & hidden and falling into poor health, our Good Neighbour Scheme volunteers have helped hundreds of people across Suffolk to maintain or improve their wellbeing, including on their return from hospital.