What innovations help to attract, recruit and retain social care workers within the UK context?
What innovations help to attract, recruit and retain social care workers within the UK context?
The social care sector has suffered staff shortages and been under pressure for several years now. The COVID-19 pandemic and restrictions on overseas recruitment have made the situation worse recently. This research aims to explore new ways to attract, recruit and retain social care workers in the UK and to understand what factors affect turnover.
Articles from 2001 – 2021 involving social workers and the social care workforce were studied. Key ideas for recruiting and retaining staff were -
Social Workers
- Opportunities for work placements prior to employment
- Recruiting graduates on fast-track programmes
- Apprenticeships
Social Care workers
- Appointing care workers as champions had a positive effect both on the champions themselves and in attracting and keeping new staff
- Pre-employment training to help build skills and confidence
- National recruitment campaigns
- Recruiting staff on the basis of their values and behaviours rather than just on their qualifications and experience
Poor terms and conditions, low pay, unsociable working hours, and inexperience of both employees and managers all made it difficult to keep social care staff in post. High stressful workloads made it difficult to keep social workers.
Pay and bonuses, good working conditions and having achievements recognised, all encouraged staff to stay.
Although there have been many new ideas tried in this area, the evidence about which ones have been successful is often poor. The results also come largely from a time before BREXIT and COVID-19 which may affect their relevance to the current situation.
We need to plan how new ideas will be evaluated right from the start so that we confidently choose successful ideas. Further research is needed so that this can be done.
Several of the ideas identified above show promise and will be investigated further by Social Care Wales who are currently drawing up a new social work framework for Wales.
Campaigns to promote care work are needed to address negative views and the low status of this work.
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