A HORDE of dedicated volunteers have stepped up to help their community through the coronavirus crisis.

The first volunteers to be approved were able to start accepting tasks through the GoodSAM app on Tuesday.

One of the super recruits is Diane Elebert-Morgan, a regional manager at the Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce.

Diane, from Great Lever, was approved as a volunteer on Tuesday, starting her new on duty role yesterday.

She said: "I wanted to help, I guess it's that patriotic feeling of wanting to help your community and your country in a moment of national crisis.

"All the tasks are quite minimal risk but it ould be saving people's lives – I can't imagine being stuck on my own so if I can help someone then that's great.

"They're not asking you to be on the front line, just to help with other things."

Volunteers have four main tasks that they could be asked to do.

Picking up and delivering medication and essentials will be a main part of the role, and volunteers will also be asked to call people who are isolating and at risk of loneliness.

Taking people for urgent medical appointments or transporting them home, and completing tasks in the hospital, such as admin work and directing visitors, are also available for volunteers.

None of the recruits will be forced to do anything they're not comfortable with, they will be alerted to nearby tasks through the app and get to choose whether they accept the job.

Volunteers are also only alerted when they set themselves as "on duty" through the app, with each person able to make themselves unavailable for new tasks whenever they wish.

Diane added: "It's very simple to use, as soon as I opened it and logged in I could use it easily, there's only four buttons.

"I'm excited to start, we've got a brilliant community where I live and we're already helping each other out.

"There's about five or six families that we speak to before we go to the shops to see if they need anything so we can help by reducing the number of people going out.

"They've given us good guidelines to keep ourselves safe while doing the tasks too."

More than 750,000 people signed up to help ease pressure from the NHS after the government's push for recruits in late March.

Applications for new helpers have temporarily paused to give teams a chance to process each volunteer, but are expected to reopen soon. Visit goodsamapp.org/nhs for more details.