"Guide us so that we may use the privilege given us to help the aged, the ill, and the very young with generosity, with discretion, and gentleness."

 

Those words are part of the Maryland Association of Hospital Auxiliaries (MAHA) prayer for auxilians, words that capture the spirit of the thousands of women and men who volunteer at Maryland's hospitals and have a profound impact on your patients and families. Hospital auxiliary members and volunteers make sure families are updated on their loved ones' statuses; they guide stressed visitors through maze-like halls; they knit warm wool caps for newborns; and they provide countless other services, some noticed, some not. Think HCAHPS scores are important? Undoubtedly, hospital volunteers have a hand in boosting them. Have budget concerns? Auxiliaries can go a long way toward stretching a hospital's dollar. A 2009 National Institutes of Health study concluded that the use of volunteers offers significant cost savings to hospitals and enhances patient satisfaction scores.

 

But Maryland's hospital volunteers and auxiliaries need your help.

 

This week, I had the opportunity to speak with members of MAHA about the massive health care delivery transformation underway in the state and how volunteers will never cease to be essential to the work hospitals do.

 

There were two lessons I took from this meeting. The first is that auxilians - intensely humble, hard-working and dedicated people - are powerful reminders that the most important work you do is in service of patients and their families. It can be too easy for executives to get caught up in the hustle of management - long-term strategic planning, contract negotiations, regulatory navigation, etc. But these volunteers remind us that hospitals are, at their heart, simply places of healing and hope. Spend some time with them and you'll reconnect with and be inspired by that purpose.

 

The second lesson - really more of a challenge for us all- is that volunteers' and auxiliaries' numbers are dwindling, and so is membership in MAHA - just 32 of Maryland's hospitals are currently members. Roughly 125,000 Marylanders volunteer at hospitals or other health care organizations, but their percentage has dropped from a decade ago. Unsurprisingly, the majority of hospital auxiliaries are older, and there doesn't seem to be enough younger volunteers entering the pipeline to help the next generation of patients.