Evaluation of the Marie Curie Cancer Care Edinburgh Volunteer Visitor Service
Marie Curie Cancer Care commissioned an evaluation of its Edinburgh Volunteer Visitor Service (VVS). The overall aim of the service is to provide respite support to carers caring for a patient at the end of life in order to enable more patients to be cared for in their own homes.
Marie Curie Cancer Care commissioned an evaluation of its Edinburgh Volunteer Visitor Service (VVS). The overall aim of the service is to provide respite support to carers caring for a patient at the end of life in order to enable more patients to be cared for in their own homes. To this end, the service provides a volunteer to visit patients in their own home, for up to three hours per week, in the capacity of a responsible friend.
The overall aim of this research was to evaluate the VVS in order to inform decisions about the future shape of Marie Curie services delivered in-home, by volunteers. Specifically, the evaluation explored:
- What the VVS aims to achieve
- The underlying assumptions about how the VVS sets out to achieve its aims
- The role of volunteers, what training they receive and how they are supervised
- How the service operates
- The demographic and clinical profile of patients who use the VVS, and from where they are referred
- The full economic cost of the VVS (including per-visit and per-patient costs)
- Views of patients, carers, volunteers, and referrers
- Options for improving and developing the VVS
- Options for ongoing evaluation of the service in the future.
The evaluation comprised:
- a review of service documentation
- analysis of data on service use and costs
- face-to-face in-depth interviews with patients and carers (x2 pairs), bereaved carers (x10), the Service Lead and the Service Co-ordinator
- in-depth telephone interviews with referring partners (x4)
- a focus group with volunteer visitors.
