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How the ‘Workforce Strategy for Adult Social Care’ is addressing our retention challenges

Lara Bywater, Director and Registered Manager of LDC Care, talks about how she believes the Strategy will help our sector tackle its retention challenges.

I’ve been so glad to support the development of the Workforce Strategy over the past year or so. Helping the Strategy come to life by participating in one of the expert working groups has been a real pleasure and I’m confident that the Strategy is one of the biggest opportunities the sector has had to tackle some of its toughest challenges.

The Strategy sets out a series of recommendations to help address a huge variety of issues, many of which are possible to put into practise fairly quickly, whereas some I think are more aspirational. I wanted to talk about one specific challenge and how the Strategy’s recommendations are helping us overcome it – retention.

As the Strategy highlights, social care suffers from a ‘leaky bucket’ problem. High turnover (28.3% in 2022-23), especially for care workers (35.6%), nurses (32.6%), and social workers (16.1%), increases costs, disrupts the continuity of people’s support and lowers morale. Essentially, we’re losing people almost as quickly as we can recruit them, which negatively impacts care, people’s careers and the effectiveness of care organisations.

Not only do you lose relationships between colleagues and those being supported, but you also suffer skill, knowledge and financial losses with every member of staff who leaves. I think it’s clear that retention efforts are a real winner for everyone. If you can make someone feel like its worth remaining employed by you, you’re making their life, the lives of those you support and your business better as a result.

One of the most significant ways I think the Strategy is doing this is by calling for unified action with regards to care sector pay. For a long time pay has been a difficult subject to broach in social care, but in reality, it’s most likely one of the most important.

I was lucky enough to speak at a Select Committee, alongside Oonagh Smyth and chaired by Jeremy Hunt in 2022, where we discussed just how little the difference in pay there was between those staff on probation and those pursuing a level three social care qualification – it was tiny, despite the significant disparity in experience.

The recommendations on the pay modelling that it puts forward as a solution to this issue are very powerful. I won’t say that I know which model would be most effective for the sector, but I will say that by prompting this discussion in such a serious manner, it’s doing a lot more than has been done in the past.

Another big part of the retention jigsaw is burnout and stress. Again, this can be a difficult subject to discuss in adult social care, as we sometimes don’t like to admit that our staff are more prone to these issues than staff in other fields of work. As the Strategy quite rightly points out, poor wellbeing leads to high vacancies, lower care quality and increased sickness absence (8.1 million days lost in 2022-23), and negatively impacts the NHS.

The Strategy proposes a series of interventions that could help with wellbeing ranging from tackling harassment to promoting free NHS health checks to social care staff. I think these are brilliant suggestions, but I’m also confident that there are many simple and free solutions available. At LDC Care, we’ve started by shifting the language we use to promote wellbeing. For example, we used to have ‘meetings of concern’, which has now been replaced with ‘wellbeing meetings’ and we’ve found people are far less reluctant to join such meetings. In addition to this, we have an early access pay system, which allows staff to access portions of their pay early to cover unexpected costs, helping to reduce financial stress. The Strategy highlights some really good example projects from other employers as evidence to support its suggestions on this topic and I’m excited to see the impact when they become more widespread.

I’m very pleased to see diversity and inclusion addressed head on in the Strategy, as it notes that social care is diverse yet lacks inclusivity in many ways, which does negatively impact retention. At LDC, 51% of our workforce is male and 40% are from an ethnically minoritised background, so this is a really important topic to us. We place a huge focus on making sure our staff feel valued and often celebrate the religious and cultural events from our staff’s heritage. We’re currently getting excited about our upcoming Diwali celebration! The Strategy uses reliable data to highlight where our inclusivity challenges lie and calls for continued support for some great projects, such as Â鶹ÉäÇø’s Social Care Workforce Race Equality Standard (SC-WRES), which can really help us address this.

Training is another vital area of improvement that really impacts retention. The Strategy highlights how much more likely staff are to remain at an employer if they feel invested in, which is why I’m so glad to see it play such a big part in the overall message.

One specific area of training that I’m particularly passionate about is apprenticeships. It’s great to see a review recommended within the Strategy for the provision of apprenticeships across the sector. We know first hand how great these courses can be, but there are some definite problems with the current model. Portability of apprenticeship training between employers has been a real sticking point for us in the past, in addition to continuity problems between course trainers. A course can really change for the worse when a trainer changes, leaving many learners lacking the continuous support they need to complete their learning. Personally, I would also like to see changes to apprenticeships to allow social care providers spend levy funds on accredited qualifications – specialist short courses which will help upskill the workforce to meet the increasingly complex needs we are seeing across adult social care.

These are my thoughts on how the Strategy is likely to help us tackle retention over the coming years. I’m confident that if enough of us continue to say the right things and do the right things and lead by example, others will follow. I believe that the Strategy is a critical step in the right direction when it comes to inspiring organisations and people across social care to make changes that will positively impact retention. It’s a huge part of the puzzle when it comes to ensuring that we have adequate provision for the social care requirements of the future, which are only going to become greater across the next decade.

Find out more about the ‘Workforce Strategy for Adult Social Care’ by checking out the Strategy recommendations or by visiting our campaign hub.

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