The increasing vacancy rate in social care is a theme running across all our insights. Mark Lee, CEO of Together Trust, compares the challenge of recruitment and retention to “filling a leaky colander with a bucket”.
Funding implications cross multiple areas in social care but are largely cited in relation to the workforce shortage and the ability to provide care.
Funding
Care homeowner Palvi Dohdia believes the funding from local authorities is not adequate to sustain the sector. She says:
“We get just over £3-4 an hour to look after your loved ones, make sure they’re okay, provide our residents with accommodation, look after their personal care needs, organise their professional visitors’ appointments, order and coordinate medication orders, all continence aids, feed them, do their laundry, keep them warm, help them with their emotional well-being, provide activities, and you spend more on a supermarket meal deal or a high street coffee than the government gives us to do all that.”
So far, money that has been promised to the sector has not been received, with many questioning whether they will see any of this funding. The experience, outside of additional funding for Covid measures during the pandemic, has been that any recent funding has gone directly to the NHS, not to social care.
17%
of respondents are reducing the number of clients/service users in order to continue to deliver services safely
The workforce shortage
One of the areas where lack of funding has the most high-profile impact is in delayed discharge of patients from hospitals, putting hospitals under increased pressure and stretching available resources.
As Jane Townson, CEO of the Homecare Association, explains, hospitals who want to discharge medically fit patients are finding it difficult to secure the social care required. In domiciliary care, the volume of delivery by larger providers has reduced by 13% because of the workforce shortage.
In interviews, we found that residential care homes are also operating below full capacity because they are unable to recruit the additional staff they need to support the maximum number of people they could accommodate and care for.
As Yasmine John says: “Companies make money by delivering services at volume. At present, we’re not able to do that and there’s an eight to 12 week waiting list. We could potentially deliver an additional 10,000 hours a week but we don’t have the staff.”
How does your organisation expect to be able to deliver your services safely, in light of staffing and funding issues?
Impact on service delivery
Staffing and funding issues impact on organisations’ ability to deliver services. The most common way to mitigate these issues is capping new clients (32%) whilst 29% of survey respondents said they were only providing basic services. This measure was most prevalent in children’s services (37%) and among smaller organisations (57%).
“We’re just not getting enough staff. There aren’t people applying for the job anymore, and also people aren’t there – it’s not a job for life anymore,” says Palvi Dohdia.
Almost a third (32%) of respondents said they only providing basic services in order to deliver services safely.
The workforce shortage has a knock-on effect on organisations’ ability to deliver services and, consequently, the sustainability.
You can make more money working in a supermarket than you could by looking after someone on their last days with dementia.
The recruitment of new staff to the care sector is inherently difficult due to unattractive hours, poor pay and many not wanting to undertake personal care.
Staff recruitment and retention
Reasons cited for staff recruitment problems include the perception that working in care is seen as a job rather than a career, low wages (particularly in comparison to other types of work), the low value people felt was attributed to care work, and the increased risks staff faced.
“You can make more money working in a supermarket than you could by looking after someone on their last days with dementia.” says Palvi Dohdia.
The most popular way to make it easier to retain staff in the sector would be to provide staff with a benefits package, the option selected by 48% of survey respondents. Better working conditions was selected by 46%, followed by respected training qualifications at 41%. Higher pay was only the fourth most popular answer at 40%, although in the elderly care sector it is seen as more important (48%) than qualifications (35%).