The adult social care sector is an industry that has consistently grappled with staffing issues, including high absenteeism, staff turnover and vacancies. This consequentially has a detrimental effect on the quality of care provided, and at a time where the global population is projected to keep rising and the pressures on the wider health and social care sector intensify, one industry leader warns that tangible action must finally be taken to address the issue.
Often, it is the pressures faced by the NHS that take up the national news headlines, yet what is often missed is the crucial element that fixing staffing issues in adult social care will inevitably help alleviate the pressure on the health service as a knock-on effect.
To illustrate this point, in the month of July 2022, NHS figures showed that almost 30,000 patients were forced to wait more than 12 hours before being admitted to hospital. While those statistics understandably took up much of the focus, it begs the question as to why this is the case.
High waiting times can be at least in part attributed to the fact that on average, 12,900 patients per day spent more time in hospital than required, an increase of 11 per cent on the previous months. Furthermore, by the end of July 2022, there were also a staggering 13,014 patients still in hospital beds who were medically fit to be discharged yet remained in hospital, often due to a lack of social care support.
Prash Patel is a director at Care More, a company that specialises in homecare and support as well as healthcare and nursing recruitment, supporting the private sector in delivering a high-quality service with a flexible and responsive approach. Responding to the NHS statistics, Patel explained that solving recruitment and retention issues in the social care sector will be critical to alleviate the pressures felt across the whole of health and social care, and the public can no longer sit and wait for solutions.
Patel told The Leaders Council: “Staffing levels within the social care sector have now reached the point of crisis. Perceptions of low industry status alongside low wages, and the lack of training and in-work support affect recruitment and retention in adult social care drastically.
“In some care sector roles, we also see lack of progression pathways which also makes it difficult to attract and retain staff that have the right skills and values for what is an important role. With the ageing population we have in the UK, demand on the industry is only going to increase.”
Indeed, the World Health Organisation has projected that by 2050 the world population of over-60-year-olds will have almost doubled from 12 per cent in 2015 to 22 per cent, a forecast indicative of the scale of future demand the sector could face.
Patel added: “The challenge of recruiting and retaining enough staff to deal with future demand couldn’t be greater, and there is more urgency than ever to address this if we are to alleviate the negative impact on care users. While the population is increasing and we’re seeing record vacancies, more care services are shutting down because they don’t have enough staff, and this cannot go on.”
Highlighting The Leaders Council’s Special Report into the Health and Care Act 2022, Patel echoed some of the concerns of the report’s contributors that ministers had recently passed up on another opportunity to devise a dedicated strategy to deal with workforce issues across health and social care.
Patel said: “While there was much positive focus on integrated services, there was a lack of any real ambition to tackle workforce issues, and this is one of the industry’s biggest problems. Addressing this has to be a priority now.
“We are seeing labour shortages, high rates of absenteeism and staff turnover and all of this had been made worse by the Covid pandemic. Government needs to come up with stronger workforce measures and a robust workforce strategy across health and social care, because the success of the reforms in the Act will depend on our industry being able to recruit and retain enough staff to deliver high-quality services.”
Patel further stressed that any government strategy to address the issues within the industry needed to be fully costed and supported by adequate sector funding.
“More funding must become available to the sector to support with recruiting and retaining staff. Local authorities need to be given a far larger social care budget and be instructed to increase the rates they pay us. As it is, we cannot afford to take on a large amount of would-be service users because we’d be running at a loss and would have to close.
“It says a lot when the government has asked all care providers to fill out a detailed spreadsheet of our business figures to come up with what ministers call the ‘fair cost of care’. The spreadsheet calculator for us and every other provider I have spoken to says that we should be paid £30 per hour in rates. Currently we are getting £19 per hour. This is the sort of shortfall we are having to deal with, and it means we are restricted in being able to offer higher wages to help retain staff.
“Even if it is going to take a long time to deal with these problems in their entirety, we in social care need to have a realistic expectation about funding, what can be delivered and by when we can hope to deliver. Now is no longer the time for mere words, it’s time to fix the staffing crisis in social care.”
Image provided by Care More
