Why we exist

The moment it started

It started with a man whose name I never got.

He was in his seventies, admitted with arrhythmia, lying alone behind a curtained bay in the middle of a busy ward. I could hear other families chatting, nurses checking obs, a consultant somewhere explaining something in a calm, reassuring voice. Behind those curtains it was just the two of us.

He wanted to talk. Not about his symptoms or his chart. About his life. His fears. What a diagnosis like his actually meant for someone his age. His hands were shaking. There was a tremor in his voice that I wasn't sure was entirely medical.

I had one more patient after him and twelve minutes left on the clock. So I kept steering him back to the clinical questions. History of presenting complaint. Past medical history. Systems review. And at some point he noticed me glancing at the curtain and just stopped. Trailed off mid-sentence. Looked at me, and let me leave.

I said sorry. I left. I never went back.

That moment stayed with me in a way that most clinical encounters don't. Not because I did something wrong by the standards of the system, but because he needed something the system simply wasn't built to give.

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Before medical school

In a care home, I had all the time in the world.

Before I started my degree, I spent time volunteering in a care home. The work was simple: sit with people. Talk to them. Ask about their lives. I organised birthday parties, made cups of tea, and listened to the same stories on repeat, and meant it every time.

There was a woman who had been a seamstress for forty years and wanted to tell me about every wedding dress she'd ever made. There was a man who'd played semi-professional football in the 1960s and had the match programmes to prove it. There were people who hadn't had a real conversation all week, and who visibly changed in the space of half an hour of being asked a genuine question and listened to properly.

I watched what happened when someone felt truly heard. The shift in how they held themselves. The way their eyes changed. It was one of the most moving things I've ever been part of, and at the time I didn't fully understand why.

Now I do. When you're old, or ill, or frightened, the thing you need most is not always medical. Sometimes it's just a person. Someone with nowhere else to be.

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The gap

The difference between those two places wasn't the patients. It was time.

In the care home I had half an hour with someone. On the ward I had twelve minutes, five patients, and a form to fill. The needs were identical. The capacity to meet them was not.

That man with arrhythmia didn't need a different doctor. He needed someone with no other patients to get to. Someone whose only job, for the next thirty minutes, was to sit with him.

The NHS knows that loneliness during a hospital stay makes outcomes worse. The research is clear: isolated patients recover more slowly, are readmitted more often, and leave hospital in worse mental health than they arrived. It isn't a soft problem. It has hard consequences. And the NHS, stretched as it is, does not always have the capacity to address it.

That is the gap The Human Part exists to fill.

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What we're doing about it

We're not here to fix the NHS. We're here to sit with the people it can't quite reach.

The Human Part places trained, vetted volunteers on NHS wards to do exactly what medicine alone cannot: be present. To listen without a checklist. To ask questions that don't need to go on a chart. To be the person in the room who isn't rushing to the next one.

We work with sixth formers who want to build genuine healthcare experience before university. We work with adults who have time and want to give it to something that matters. And we work with NHS trusts who know their patients need this, and want someone to take it off their plate and run it properly.

Every volunteer we place goes through an enhanced DBS check, a structured induction, and safeguarding training before they set foot on a ward. We handle the logistics. The volunteer shows up. The patient gets company. It's a simple idea, and it works.

— Eshan Sheikh, Founder