Raina Summerson, CEO, Agincare
We start 2023 with ongoing uncertainty in social care, though this is nothing new for those of us who have worked in it for many years. Agincare provides an extensive range of care services covering home care and extra care, live-in care, training, supported living and care home but within this a huge variety of projects and high number of different partners. As such, we often find that demand for different services will ebb and flow, along with the specific opportunities or threats associated with each model of care delivery.
Home care finished 2022 in a particularly difficult place, not due to lack of demand for what it provides but due to ongoing workforce challenges that increased with multiple factors impacting through the year. These included the cost of living, driving people to different employment or a reduction in working hours to manage childcare costs, (let’s not forget that as across social care, home care workers tend to be female and work part-time). Other factors included fuel costs rocketing and car ownership becoming more difficult, especially for younger workers, and a move to more fluid work choices which give flexibility to work from home, as opposed to in someone’s home.
The big rise in National Living Wage due in April 2023 is welcomed for the workforce, though there remain calls for a higher rate to be introduced for social care to differentiate it from competitor sectors such as hospitality and retail. However, such huge rises in costs across the provision of home care simply have to be met and this is placing huge pressure on under-funded local authority partners, the NHS and indeed people who are paying for their own care.
The demand for people to remain in their own homes continues, both in policy and personal preference. As the Social Care Future (@socfuture) movement strapline starts ‘We all want to live in the place we call home…’. But the means to do this are becoming depleted each day through the lack of action and real change in social care. Reforms come and go, the situation worsens for many people across the country, borne in doom and gloom headlines with Skills for Care reporting 165,000 staff vacancies (up by a staggering 55,000 vacancies from the previous year), Local Government Association reports of increasing inability to meet needs and balance budgets, charities running out of steam and cash, and care provider failure.
So, can this be a Happy New Year for home care? For Agincare, recruitment and retention has seen some recent glimmers of hope, driven partly by our ongoing commitment to investing in our people programme and all that entails, partly by some changes afoot in society. Some great partnership working, with councils and NHS and people who draw on our services, shows that if we can work better together, we can make the best of scarce resources and do some innovative and exciting work that attracts and retains teams. And, as true care can do so well, this enables people to live as independently as possible and free up allocation of resources to go forward and support elsewhere.
In this changing landscape, with invariably more complex care needs being supported and often shorter periods of working alongside people, our home care teams need more support than ever in juggling various demands placed on them. Well-being, learning and development and recognition remain a priority, both internally as an organisation and through driving better external recognition and reward across society.
PM Rishi Sunak in his first speech of the year set out a five point plan for 2023, and included priority number four, ‘NHS waiting lists will fall and people will get the care they need more quickly.’
As I write traditional winter pressures on the NHS are taking grip driven by exceptionally high numbers of flu and Covid cases. It highlights that the pivotal role of social care as part of a fully functional, funded and holistic health and care system has never been more needed. And if not now in 2023, then when?
