A literature review on healthcare volunteerism

Abstract

Shrinking health care resources, especially the lack of health care staffs is an important public health challenge in the 21st century. One of the good practical solutions is to use volunteers as free supplementary human resources in healthcare settings. This literature review purposes to identify benefits of healthcare volunteerism, which covers three levels related to the benefits of healthcare volunteerism in terms of economic value analyses, patients’ satisfaction and safety, as well as benefits to volunteers and healthcare staff. Furthermore, this review aims to draw out the key health care policy issues and implications that healthcare organizers should take into consideration when setting up and implementing an effective, efficient and economical volunteering initiative. PubMed and Medline were searched using Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) and inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied, finally, sixteen studies were retrieved. Limitations of this literature review were also mentioned.