Volunteers Matter: Cost-Effective Alternatives for the Provision of Emergency Services

Background:  With increasing pressure to improve the caliber of service while reducing cost, emergency departments must seek support outside traditional means.  Volunteers may be a potential solution.  Emergency department exposure provides prospective health care professionals opportunities to explore the field, while providing patients with tangible and meaningful services.

Purpose:  This review investigates the impact of volunteer programs on patient satisfaction in the emergency department. 

Methods:  PubMed and the Cochrane Library were searched for peer-reviewed studies, identifying 38,958 studies.  Included articles evaluated one or more outcomes, including patient satisfaction and return visits.    

Findings:  After applying inclusion criteria, four studies were included: 2 randomized control trials, one comparative study, and one case report.  In general, emergency department volunteerism showed an improvement in patient satisfaction, decrease in return visits, and increase in care provided to older adults.

Conclusion: There is limited evidence for volunteer programs impact on emergency department outcomes, although existing evidence suggests it may yield some improvements.  Given the potential impact to better serve diverse, underserved, and a wide breadth of acuity and demographics, cost-effective improvements to emergency department services may have individual and population health impact and importance.  Different volunteer program recruitment strategies, locations, and assessment measures makes comparative analysis difficult.  There is need for developing standardized measures to assess outcomes and further research to evaluate volunteer programs in the emergency department.