UK care sector staffing has hit breaking point, report shows

A new report released yesterday shows 97% of UK care organisations have issues with rostering whilst almost half of care staff are significantly unhappy with their pay.

Advanced, one of the UK’s largest providers of mission-critical business software and services, commissioned the Care Trends Report to understand the specific challenges care and support providers are facing and how they plan to address them.

The survey took responses from 435 care and support provider owners, CEOs, managing directors, Chief Financial Officers and Chief Operating Officers working in domiciliary care, residential care, supported living, extra care and retirement living.

As well as discovering overarching issues with rostering and staff being unhappy with their pay, the survey also found 48% of care providers find compliance and reportable event management a real issue due to their current IT systems being inadequate, potentially putting clients at risk. Furthermore, over one-third (34%) of care leadership has had previous incidents of missing records.

Against this backdrop, the care sector has been trying to introduce digital resources to help with the current crisis – including technology to monitor patients at home so they can free up beds in care homes for those who need them the most.

‘We commissioned this survey to better understand the challenges facing the care sector and how technology can help to solve some of these issues,’ said Ric Thompson, MD, Health and Care, at Advanced. ‘These results demonstrate how technology can help manage the precious resources within the care sector and enable them to gain better control of their organisations through a much more detailed and granular view of data – freeing up more time of managers and staff to deal with the more pressing and urgent issues, and of course patient care.’

Results from the survey also showed almost one-quarter of care leadership reported being stressed and unable to cope all the time – this number jumped to 66% in leaders running an organisation with over 1,000 employees experiencing the same issues. The survey also revealed that on average, 7% of care and support leaders are planning to leave their roles to deal with stress, with females more likely to leave at 13%, and males at 6%.

However, the shocking statistics unveiled from the survey, sadly do no come as much of a surprise as figures previously published by Skills for Care have found that the sector is facing a serious workforce shortage, with more than one in 10 care worker posts remaining unfulfilled.