Care Workers: Building The Future Social Care Workforce
This is a new paper from the Social Care Institute for Excellence. It is based on discussions with key stakeholders and forms part of a wider research projectwhich considering how the sector might respond to the challenges in relation to recruiting, training and retaining care workers.
The paper looks at three hypothetical future scenarios and highlights the following common responses and actions that may help to attract more people to a career working in care and produce more skilled care workers – whatever economic or political scenario the sector may face:
1) Change the brand and language of care and support: Terms like ‘social care worker’ may no longer best describe the complexity of the role 2) Develop and promote portfolio careers, with more flexibility and opportunities that reflect people’s lifestyles (e.g. returning to work after bringing up families) 3) Attract care workers from outside the UK, especially if Brexit leads to a fall in EU workers. This could be done in partnership with the NHS 4) Co-ordinate local recruitment across health, care and related areas such as housing within specific areas – such as Sustainability and Transformation Plan areas 5) Introduce user-led training which focuses on the values that are important within social care. A new nationally sponsored, but locally managed, training programme, led and delivered by people who use services, may be a useful approach.