VIRTUAL HEALTH CARE VOLUNTEER

Virtual Health Care Volunteer

Virtual Health Care Volunteer

Introduction

The tsunami in January 2005 highlighted the number of people involved in overseas development work. Many qualified individuals took time out from their regular work in order to travel round the world to help. Web sites list details of 280 Tanzania based not-for-profit aid organisations and 29,500 world-wide aid organisations which offer development and aid jobs overseas. Even when there is no emergency, first-world aid organisations routinely recruit volunteers willing to work abroad, unpaid, in third-world conditions, for long periods. Many individuals therefore spend significant periods away from home and careers voluntarily engaged in aid work. In terms of Western images of career advancement, such excursions interrupt regular life and career progression, and appear to be foolhardy.

Furthermore, while a substantial literature has been developed concerning “expatriate assignment” within corporate boundaries (Arthur and Bennett, 1995; Caligiuri, 1997; Downes and Thomas, 1999; Oddou, 1991; Ones and Viswesvaran, 1997; Porter and Tansky, 1999), little is known about the personal dynamics of international volunteer work, or its longer-term effects on careers and lives.

In this paper, we seek to explore the factors leading individuals to volunteer for overseas development assignments, their experience of these assignments and the effects on them in terms of personal change and potential career development. First, we consider the meagre existing research. Next we outline relevant theoretical schema derived from the literature. We then report on the objectives, method and findings from a longitudinal study of 48 development workers assigned by the Tanzania agency VSA (Volunteer Service Abroad). Finally we summarise and discuss these findings.

Previous research

Research on the career effects of volunteer work overseas is limited. Retrospective studies by VSO (1998), the British Volunteer Service Overseas organisation, and AVA in Australia (Reark Research, 1998) suggest that the majority of volunteers considered that their assignments had influenced their personal development and/or career progress positively, but that around 10 per cent felt it had hindered them. Over half the volunteers in both studies returned to their old job or similar work following the assignment, but many used the experiences as a basis for major change, including career progression into professional aid work. Overall, the results suggested that the assignment caused short-term disruption to volunteers' careers, but had long-term benefits for many.

These studies are relatively uninformative because they are shallow, large-sample surveys. They provide potentially generalisable statistical data but give little information on the reality of volunteer experience or its effects on the individual, particularly the individual's learning.

In a longitudinal qualitative study, Starr (1994) considered the lives and attitudes of 21 Peace Corps volunteers 20 years after their assignments. The volunteer experience was typically viewed retrospectively as a “turning point in their life course” (Starr, 1994, p. 137) volunteers had used the time as a “sanctioned withdrawal from conventional society in order to discover their true self and prepare for adult commitment” (Starr, 1994, p. 146). However, the average age of these volunteers at the time of their assignment was only 22, and ...