Can I become a volunteer Health Connect Coach?

About the role

A volunteer coach is someone who has a good understanding of their own long-term health condition and is motivated to use the skills and strategies they have developed to manage their condition well.

They will be carefully recruited, trained, supported and supervised to volunteer in this role.

As a Volunteer Health Connect Coach you will be connecting with, and using health coaching skills to support and empower, individuals to manage their long-term health condition.

Through coaching conversations, your peer will be supported to increase their knowledge, skills, understanding and confidence, in order to move forward with positive changes, and goal setting they would like to make (short and long term) to enable better management of their health and wellbeing.

Engagement of a peer’s knowledge, skills, understanding and confidence (also known as activation levels) will be measured. In order to assist for the most beneficial positive behavioural change in your peer, a consistent approach is desirable for a minimum of six consecutive months. The stepped/ tapered approach used with peers is based on the below model; 14 sessions per peer over 6 months, with flexibility if needed.

Ideally you will be paired with a peer who experiences the same or similar health condition or symptoms to yourself. This is so that your own lived experience and personal understanding can provide additional support to your peer through your person-centred coaching conversations.

This role is mostly online but you may meet you matched peers face to face in a community location depending on preference.

You may like to take a look at a short video that has been created about the volunteer health connect coach role.

Or hear it first hand from some of our volunteer coaches themselves.

Volunteer application and recruitment process

If you have lived experience of a long-term health condition and you are interested in applying for this volunteer role as a health connect coach, you can do so on our online volunteering portal.

Training

Following completion of your mandatory topics to become a volunteer this role will provide specific role training in health and wellbeing coaching skills. This is a blended training course of online learning activities and live online video group sessions to embed theory and practice. The training course is an equivalent 2-day course spread over 8 weeks and has been continually co-designed with people living with long term conditions. Currently our training is only available online via the Microsoft Teams platform. A coach handbook and resource pack is available to support you ongoing in your role along with regular 1:1 and group supervision.