The gravity of the staffing crisis in social care has been underlined as North Yorkshire County Council launches its biggest ever recruitment drive for the sector.
The number of people applying for social care jobs has plummeted, partly due to yesterday’s introduction of mandatory vaccines for care staff.
A full meeting of the council next week will hear at least three of its executive members highlight concerns over the 70 per cent drop in applications for jobs in social care across the 500 providers in the county since July and providers continuing to go out of business, partly due to staff costs.
On any given day there are at least 1,000 jobs available across the county.
A high percentage of the county’s care homes are in the Harrogate district.
In an attempt to fill the vacancies, providers in the county are offering extra financial incentives to staff to take on the roles, from a £1,500 golden handshake for a care setting nursing role in Northallerton to carers being offered £2,000 for referring three friends.
Councillor Michael Harrison, executive member for adult services, said:
“We have people who have joined us from all different types of experiences, some from the entertainment sector; actors, drummers, from the travel sectors; pilots, cabin crew, and everything in-between.
“There is a great career to be had in care and great stability and we support people who join us with career development. From the word go you can make a big difference to somebody’s life in this job; the work that you do really counts towards improving lives and no two days are the same.”
There are 20,000 people in North Yorkshire working in the care sector, from the 13,000 care and support workers in 500 organisations providing services in residential care and people’s homes through to social workers, project managers and administrators.
The alerts come after the authority said it was having to intervene in a number of care homes to keep them staffed and the government undertook to provide workforce recruitment and retention funding to support local authorities and providers to recruit and retain sufficient staff over winter.
In a statement to the meeting, the authority’s leader, Councillor Carl Les, said:
“I am pleased that as the government launches a nationwide initiative we are undertaking more locally the biggest ever recruitment campaign to attract people into a rewarding and progressive career.”
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The council has recently warned the situation would only worsen with about 200 fewer care workers in the county due to rules requiring all care workers to be vaccinated.
Before yesterday’s deadline, numerous foreign-born care staff in North Yorkshire had said they would leave the UK if they had to have the covid jab to work.
Pay concerns
Care workers have also suggested the lack of pay progression, with staff with more than five years’ experience being paid just 6p more an hour than those with less than a year in the role in 2020-21 is a cause of recruitment difficulties.
In a statement to the meeting, Councillor Michael Harrison, the authority’s adult social care executive member said the county’s situation reflects fierce competition within the labour market alongside hospitality, retail, heavy goods transport and construction.
He said:
“Pressures are building within nursing, residential home and domiciliary care capacity as a result of workforce pressures within the external market, and we continue to see provider failures in the system.
“Packages of care are being handed back to the council to either re-source or find alternative solutions to keep people safe. This is putting significant pressure on and impacting our in-house provision as we try to find solutions for people or fill the gaps using staff from our services.
“This is impacting our ability to provide re-ablement and respite services. Complex care packages are being handed back at short notice alongside those requiring two carers or in more rural locations. In addition we are seeing care home providers withdraw from providing nursing care or withdraw completely from the market.”
Warning of “difficult choices” in the upcoming Budget, the council’s finance boss Councillor Gareth Dadd will tell the meeting that securing the necessary workforce remains acutely challenging.
In an attempt to ease staffing pressures, the council is working with providers and has just launched a recruitment campaign focusing on the diversity of career opportunities in care.
Coun Harrison said:
“We are working with providers and partners to look at options and ideas to work more efficiently and promote people’s safety should we not manage to recruit more people to the sector.
“A system plan is in place with short, medium and long term actions to address issues relating to workforce, which includes capacity for registered manager support to care homes, recruitment to reablement, and recruitment to NHS posts to ensure sufficient intermediate capacity is available to meet the growing demand.”
