Karolina Gerlich, Chief Executive at The Care Workers’ Charity, argues that sustainability in social care will only succeed if care workers are actively involved in shaping it, drawing on the frontline insight that turns environmental ambitions into everyday practice.
The Care Quality Commission’s (CQC) Single Assessment Framework now includes an environmental sustainability quality statement under the “well-led” key question, and while formal assessment is still focused on NHS trusts and integrated care systems, the expectation is clearly expanding. Providers across social care are being asked to understand their environmental impact and show what they are doing about it. That is a reasonable ask. But it raises a more fundamental question: who, within a care organisation, is actually in a position to make sustainability real?
The answer is care teams. Environmental sustainability in care services cannot be achieved without the people delivering care on board, not as passive recipients of another new policy, but as the people shaping what it looks like day to day. Care workers see what gets wasted. They know which lights stay on in empty rooms, which meals come back untouched, which supplies arrive over-packaged and under-used. They understand the rhythms and routines of a service in ways that no top-down strategy document ever could. If sustainability is going to mean anything beyond a paragraph in an annual report, it has to start with those insights.
That means co-production. We talk in social care about designing services with people rather than for them, and the same principle applies here. Asking care teams what they would change, what frustrates them about waste, what small shifts might make a difference is not just good practice. It is the only approach that will stick. Sustainability shaped with care workers becomes part of how a service thinks and operates.
This conversation also needs to reach beyond residential settings. The challenges are different, but the principle is the same. If we want greener practice in homecare, we need to be having honest conversations with the people doing the work about what is realistic, what support they need and where the quick wins might be. Route planning, reducing single-use products, working with people who draw on care to think about small household-level changes together.
At the centre of all of this are professional care workers themselves. Asking them to take on a green agenda without resourcing it properly, without listening to them, without recognising the expertise they already bring would be repeating a pattern the sector knows all too well. But done differently, done with genuine co-production and respect for professional judgement, sustainability could be something care workers feel ownership of.
Social care has always been resourceful. Providers and care workers have spent years doing extraordinary things with very little. The green agenda does not need to feel like one more weight on already tired shoulders. It can be an extension of what the sector does best: making the most of what is available, wasting less, thinking ahead and putting people at the heart of every decision. But only if we start by asking the right people the right questions.
