VOLUNTEERING PROFESSOR GEORGE CROOKS OBE – CEO, DHI (SCOTLAND), UK
Digital innovation in NHS volunteering
Professor George Crooks OBE, CEO of Scotland’s Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre (DHI), explains how a new initiative is delivering a transformation programme that is reshaping Scotland’s NHS volunteering service.
Sixty three-year-old Fleming McNiven from Broxburn spent 40 years sitting behind a desk as a chartered accountant before the desire to “give something back” took hold. “I never really enjoyed my work,” he
says, “but one thing I really did enjoy was the sense of community of being with people in the office. And so, when I retired, I wanted to get out and be with people. Also, I wanted to keep the brain cells going but really, I wanted to give something back.” So, when the chance to volunteer at St
John’s Hospital in Livingston came up during the pandemic, Fleming threw himself into it. He works Tuesday mornings in the outpatient department for ophthalmology, diabetes, and podiatry, and on a Thursday morning at the hospital’s main entrance reception. “I greet people as they come in,
directing them if they’re vulnerable or nervous,” he continues. “I think it’s really good for them to see a friendly face. And when people are obviously distressed for any reason, we can support them by sympathetically showing them where to go or just talking to them. “I once took a lady up to the second floor in the hospital in the lift because she couldn’t use the stairs and was too scared to go in the lift on her own, so if I hadn’t been there, she would have missed her appointment. I know that’s very much
Volunteering fosters social connections
appreciated because patients and visitors regularly come back to us to say thank you so much for helping them out. “I’m only there for a few hours a week,
but they really do show appreciation and thank me.”
Falling volunteer numbers Volunteering is vital to the NHS in Scotland, but volunteer numbers halved to 3,000 since the pandemic. To tackle this, Healthcare Improvement Scotland (HIS), which is part of NHS Scotland, established – and is now delivering – a business transformation programme to reshape Scotland’s NHS volunteering service. With shifting age demographics altering traditional engagement models, this initiative aims to deliver a modern, scalable, and digitally enabled volunteer service fit for the future. The Digital Health & Care Innovation
Centre (DHI) has collaborated with HIS to shape and drive the transformation through co-developing a new model of volunteering. This will regenerate the service while broadening the scope of volunteering opportunities. It will also help demonstrate impact and value to individuals, communities and society.
The result is a new national NHS
Scotland Volunteering Service, underpinned by a market-leading Volunteer Management System (VMS), which will automate and streamline the volunteering processes. The collaboration used design innovation to develop a new business and operating model for volunteering, setting out an efficient, sustainable, national approach to the volunteering lifecycle. Rachael Honeyman, head of
volunteering for NHS Lothian, sees the transformation as addressing multiple needs simultaneously. “We can see there’s benefits for volunteering across a wide variety of different angles,” she explains. “We’ve got the benefits to the volunteers themselves. Volunteering can have really positive impacts on someone’s physical and mental health by providing social connections, routine, physical activity and opportunities to engage with people through meaningful activities.” For NHS staff, volunteers provide support that makes a real difference to patient care. “A lot of the time our staff can be very busy with their clinical roles and aren’t able to necessarily spend as long with patients one-to-one that they might like to,” Honeyman notes. “But our volunteers can come in and act as a friendly face, providing that bit of company, reducing isolation, and spending quality time engaging with people.”
Professor Crooks leads an organisation that is tasked with delivering innovation in digital health and care that will help Scotland’s people to live longer, healthier lives, deliver sustainable health and care services for the future and create economic benefits for Scotland. He was previously the Medical Director for NHS 24, the Scottish Ambulance Service and Director of the
Scottish Centre for Telehealth & Telecare. George was a General Medical Practitioner for 23 years in
Aberdeen latterly combining that role as Director of Primary Care for Grampian.
George is on the Board of the European Connected Health Alliance and is a past president of the European Health
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Professor George Crooks OBE Telematics Association. He was an assessor for the
European Commission on programmes involving digital health and care provision, led the Integrated Care Action Group in the European Innovation Partnership for Active and Healthy Ageing and is a member of the WHO roster of experts for digital health. He has been an advisor on digital health and care to several European governments and global organisations including the World Bank. He is an advisor to Innovate UK for its Industrial Grand Challenge
programme for Health Ageing and an adjunct Professor of Telehealth at the University of Southern Denmark.
George was awarded an OBE for services to healthcare in the 2011 Queen’s New Year Honours List.
IFHE DIGEST 2026
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