The subject of the presented work was an attempt at
optimization of the methods used for verification of the candidates
for medical voluntary workers in a hospice and decreasing
the danger of a negative influence of an incompetent
volunteer on a person in a terminal stage of a disease and his or
her relatives. The study was carried out in St. Lazarus Hospice
in Krakow, Poland, and included 154 adult participants in four
consecutive editions of "A course for volunteers - a guardian
of the sick" organized by the hospice. In order to improve the
recruitment of these workers, the hitherto methods of selection
(an interview with the coordinator of volunteering and no less
than 50% of attendance in classes of a preparatory course for
volunteers") were expanded by additional instruments-the
tests whose usefulness was examined in practice.
Knowledge of candidates was tested with the use of a written
examination which consisted of four open questions and an
MCQ test comprising 31 questions. Practical abilities were
checked by the Objective Structured Clinical Examination
(OSCE). A reference point for the results of these tests was a
hidden standardized long-term observation carried out during
the subsequent work of the volunteers in the stationary ward in
the hospice using the Amsterdam Attitude and
Communication Scale (AACS). Among the tests used, the
greatest value (confirmed by a quantitative and qualitative
analysis) in predicting how a given person would cope with practical tasks and in contact with the sick and their relatives
had a practical test of the OSCE type.