Aged Care Volunteer Visitors Scheme
The Aged Care Volunteer Visitors Scheme (ACVVS) is a government funded scheme. it supports community-based organisations (known as auspices) to recruit and match volunteers who then provide friendship and companionship through volunteer visits to care recipients of Australian Government funded residential aged care and home care packages who are isolated in the communities of Bega, Eden, Merimbula, Pambula and Tura Beach and many more locations in the Far South Coast of NSW.
Who are the recipients?
The ACVVS is a free service available for people who:
• are socially isolated, including if they belong to a diverse, complex vulnerability or cultural group
• do not have regular and reasonably frequent positive and engaged contact with friends or relatives
• feel isolated and lonely
• have frailty, mobility or communication impairment that prevents them from participating in social or leisure opportunities
• have been approved for, or are in receipt of government residential aged care or a home care package
Who are the volunteers?
Anyone that is willing. Volunteers go through a process of checks that are organised by the Coordinator, which includes a police check and referee check. Where required, they must show proof of vaccinations, this is done where the recipient lives in an aged care home or there own home as directed by the facility and/or recipient. A driver's licence and registration is required if the recipient is being driven by the volunteer. Volunteers are supported continually for as long as they are involved through training, personal support, and recognition of value.
What does a Volunteer Visitor Do?
As a volunteer visitor you are asked to make a visit to someone once a fortnight to someone living in an aged care home, or a person in their own home who is receiving a Government funded Aged Care Package.
The ACVVS Coordinator connects older people with volunteers like yourself who can:
Sit and chat about a wide range of interests
Watch a favourite television program
Work with them on a hobby
Read to them or listen to music together
Be a good friend who visits regularly and/or take them out for a drive, cuppa, movies etc
Even go fishing