Friendship Call Volunteer – Peter

I have known Peter for a couple of years now as her originally wanted to volunteer with the Alzheimer’s Society, but he found the training to be too daunting and he dropped out. Peter is a highly intelligent man that used to be a chemical engineer for TATA steel. He started to develop mental health issues, ODC and other problems and had to give up his job. He is an avid painter. He lost all of his confidence and was worried when he approached me again as a volunteer. After offering him reassurance that the training and induction was a lot easier than previously – he decided to give the friendship call volunteer role a go with a lot of support from me. He was extremely nervous to make his first calls, so we allocated Peter people that we thought he would find easy to communicate with. After his first calls, he rang me and was so proud of what he had achieved, he couldn’t stop saying what it meant to him to be able to give something to people and that he had an enjoyed it more than he expected. He immediately build a rapport with one of his service users, so much so that after a follow up with her, she has asked if he could continue calling her as she found him to be such a lovely person ‘he feels like an angel to me, and I am sure if I met him, he would be wearing a halo’ I reported back to Peter what had been said, and he was so happy so say that he would be very willing to continue calling this lady and they are now building a great relationship and Peter’s confidence is growing from strength to strength.