The staffing crisis in social care is not something that is new, but it is something that is progressively more concerning, made worse by the policy mandating vaccination in care homes and soon the wider care sector. It’s estimated that there were around 110,000 vacancies in social care prior to the mandate, with tens of thousands added to this post mandate and a projection of a requirement of another 500,000 more staff by 2035.
With so few people entering the sector, how do we solve the problem?
One could argue it’s about money. We should be paying our social care workforce better wages as the social care sector takes on more responsibility. Care workers are seeing their workloads increase and become more professional - their wages should reflect this. Personally, I believe in an elevated wage of £12.50 upwards, but maybe we should start small and aim for parity between social care workers and NHS workers, who are paid on average £7500 more as discovered in the ‘unfair to care’ report.
Too much focus is put on ‘fixing’ the sector when we should be suggesting changing it instead
It’s not just about money though. Career image has been an afterthought for many years in social care, with many unaware of the variety of career choices, be it chef, activity coordinator, manager, social care nurse. Maybe a skills register or a professional database would be one step towards cementing a care as a true career choice?
It also comes down to satisfaction. The pandemic has taken its toll both physically and mentally on our social care workforce, with an increase of burnout, stress, and even PTSD plaguing the workforce. We need to normalise saying “thank you” and being grateful for the work our care teams do. At the Institute of Health and Social Care Management, we have recently partnered with TAP – Thank and Praise, which is a free to use thanks and gratitude platform aiming to help the sector make thanking easier.
Too much focus is put on ‘fixing’ the sector when we should be suggesting changing it instead. Working hours need to adapt a more flexible approach align with the busy lives of people. Too often we see in care homes rigid shift structure that ostracise working parents or others with equal time commitments.
The conversation of recruitment and retention is a lengthy one that is also heavily reliant on quality training, wellbeing support, values-based recruitment amongst a raft of other things.
The ‘fix’ won’t occur by just sorting one of these issues, but by working in collaboration with health and the government and by engaging with providers to create and adapt the sector.