Professor Martin Green, Chief Executive at Care England shares his thoughts on the current workforce challenges in social care.
Social care is amid a workforce crisis. The data from Skills for Care shows that there are over 152,000 vacancies across the care sector. The problems with recruitment and retention are long-standing, and the Pandemic and Brexit have exacerbated them. Sadly, the Government has also added to our problems, and rather than delivering solutions, they have been unhelpful. Firstly, they refused to develop a workforce strategy for the social care sector, though, of course, they did one for the NHS, and on top of that, they have brought in a range of policies which separated social care and health and made our life even more difficult. I am thinking of policies such as mandatory vaccination, which would be sensible if it were applied across the entire system.
However, because it was only directed at residential care, we lost 30,000 staff, many of whom went to work in the NHS. The latest in the long line of government announcements designed to cause a problem in the care sector has been the change in visa requirements, which do not allow care staff to bring in dependents, which is still open to NHS staff. The latest data shows that the arrival of this policy has reduced the number of social care staff coming from overseas by 50%. The Government’s rationale for changing this policy was that care workers had brought a lot of dependents to the UK. They were very happy to bandy around the figures relating to social care, and they remained completely mute when it came to telling us how many dependents had arrived with NHS staff.
Once again, social care has been relegated to a second-class service, with political and media attention primarily focused on the NHS. The detrimental effects of this policy are being felt by families struggling to find services for their loved ones and by the NHS, which is constantly in crisis and unable to find placements for post-intervention patients. The impact of government policies on the social care sector is undeniable, and it is high time for policy reform.
What is particularly galling is to see the number of times politicians and staff at the Department of Health and Social Care talk about integration and then deliver completely separate policy which drives a wedge between the two parts of the system and always prioritise the NHS. I sometimes think the Department for Health and Social Care should be renamed the NHS Support Authority because its primary focus is always the NHS. We need to recognise that the 21st century is characterised by people living with long-term conditions that cannot be cured, and faced with this reality, we need to invest heavily in social care and ensure that it is available to our current and future citizens.
I see little evidence that the minds of politicians have caught up with this reality, and they are completely fixated on the 1948 model that assumes people will be both diagnosed and cured by the NHS; in fact, they will have to be supported to live the best life they can with a long-term condition. Until politicians and the wider system get their heads around demographic change and differences in our citizen’s needs, we will always see them focusing on organisations and processes rather than shifting the dial and thinking about people and outcomes.
@ProfMartinGreen @CareEngland
