Recruiting and maintaining social care workers
- 11 Dec
Employers struggle to fill the estimated 60,000 available vacancies in adult social care in England.
Finding suitable people with the right vacancies to fill these positions is one of the aims behind the national recruitment and retention strategy. This was launched in September 2014 along with employers, Skills for Care and other partners.
There's no one simple solution to this problem, but it was one of the drivers behind refreshing the national recruitment and retention strategy along with employers, Skills for Care and other partners. It outlines a number of major programmes in three main areas. These are raising the profile of career opportunities in adult social care, encouraging better recruitment practices, and addressing the issue of above average staff turnover rates.
Skills for Care is putting recruitment and retention at the centre of its activities at national, area and local levels offering resources to support employers.
The key element this approach is that what has been developed is based around employers' own practice and experience. Demand for social care services is expected to significantly increase significantly over the upcoming years as the population grows and people live longer with more complex needs.
There is also greater emphasis on recruiting people for their values and developing positive workplace cultures to support the maintenance of employees.
Some employers have to make difficult decisions based on urgent need, but there is a high cost (in terms of money, business reputation, staff morale, performance and quality of service provided to others) of not recruiting the right people when unproductive recruitment decisions are made.
From a recent report on adult social care, it is shown that the sector is made up of complex mix of employers. It is important that those who are looking for work, returning to work or looking for a career change are found and have knowledge about the gratifying workforce of long term care workers and that this type of employment can be preserved by employers.
Read more here.
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