On Friday 16th June 2017, LawnBrook Care Home will be holding an open day! The team at FNTC Training would like to invite you all to come along and visit. We are very proud to be helping LawnBrook in developing and expanding their workforce, so you may see some of us in the home on Friday!

In honour of Carers Week 2017, LawnBrook have opened their doors to invite people to come and spend time in the home, and to meet the residents and staff – this is an excellent chance to discover what LawnBrook is all about.

For more information about LawnBrook’s open day, please see the flyer on the left.

On Monday 10th April, a new resource was made available to social care employers – one designed to assist them in planning and developing their workforce! This resource is an online tool that has been developed by Skills for Care in partnership with the Oxfordshire County Council. The tool will help employers to better understand the complexities of workforce development and planning.

With an estimated 90,000 vacancies in the adult social care sector on any given day, and a staff turnover rate of 27.3% for directly employed staff working in the adult social care sector (2016), more and more employers are seeking guidance and resources around planning and developing their workforce for the future.

 

What is the online tool?

The online tool uses a simple ‘question and answer’ format to assist employers in exploring the factors that can affect workforce capacity and capability. The tool will then use these answers to send a personalised email report to the employer, which includes recommendations for actions, along with links to further resources and guidance. This resource is also completely free for social care employers to use!

 

Jim Thomas, Programme Head – Workforce Innovation at Skills for Care has said that “we developed and tested this tool with, and for, social care employers to explore a wide range of workforce issues and challenges.” He is aware that these challenges may vary between employers, but generally include “workforce supply and demand, succession planning and establishing learning and development priorities for their organisation.”

Rachel Lawrence, Commercial Manager at Oxfordshire County Council has further commented that “workforce planning is about making sure that your organisation has the right number of people, with the right values and skills, in the right place, at the right time, for the right cost. That’s a tall order, especially as the social care sector is currently facing huge workforce challenges. This tool will help employers, particularly small employers, to take a step back and explore all of these factors in some detail. By understanding what’s really happening on issues such as staff retention and sickness absence, employers will be better placed to take the actions needed today to deliver the workforce that they – and we – need for the future.”

 

To access the new online tool, please click here (or visit www.skillsforcare.org.uk/WPDT).

FNTC Training would like to remind all apprentices that the minimum hourly rate that they can be paid will be increasing from £3.40 an hour to £3.50! This is a bigger increase than rates for most other groups have seen. All wage increases will be put into effect from 1st April 2017 – this is no April Fools joke!

Sajid Javid, secretary of state for business, innovation, and skills, has explained that due to previous wage increases for apprentices, one reason why this has happened is to ensure that “apprenticeships remain an attractive option for young people”.

This increase is being viewed as a much-needed pay rise, and has been praised by the Learning and Work Institute. The institute’s director of policy and research, Tony Wilson, has said that the pay rise is a welcome announcement, as this will give “a much-needed pay rise to over one million low paid workers”.

However, this increase in the minimum wage paid to apprentices may not address some access issues surrounding apprenticeships. Many people, who are either already apprentices or are looking into becoming one, can struggle due to issues that may be out of their control. These issues can include travel costs (which can be expensive and sometimes prohibitive), and people (such as care leavers) who need to live independently.

 

To find out more about the reasons behind the wage increase, please visit the TES website. To view all of the new wage increases, please visit the official Government website.

A recent episode of BBC’S Panorama programme has brought many well-documented challenges that face the home care sector into focus.

Thousands of people across the country are experiencing good quality care from the majority of organisations registered with CQC (Care Quality Commission) to provide care in their homes. The quality of care is mostly good, but very often this is down to amazingly dedicated care workers going above and beyond to support the people despite the current system, not because of it.

CQC’s most current ratings analysis shows that 1 in 5 home care services are not providing high quality care, with concerns about leadership and safety continuing, and this has a direct impact on the health and well-being of people who are using those services.

It has been highlighted before that too many providers are struggling to turn things around. This is still happening with around half of home care services originally rated as requires improvement staying the same or getting worse on re-inspection. What is just as worrying is that CQC are returning to services that were originally rated as good, and although this is based on small numbers (123 inspections), their early assessments show that 20% of these services have fallen to requires improvement and 5% have deteriorated to inadequate, which reinforces concerns about the sustainability of quality services.

What are the impacts of this?

When corners are cut on the quality of care that is being provided, the people relying on care, along with their family and carers, can experience:

• Poorly trained staff who do not know how to care for someone with complex needs
• Sketchy care plans that do not provide staff with the information they need to care for someone properly
• Rushed visits that may leave someone with an illness like dementia feeling even more confused by the person who just came and then went again
• Increased isolation, as staff do not have time to stay and chat, which would create a human connection that can mean a lot to someone
• High staff turnover, which means that the continuity of care that people value is simply not possible
• Missed calls that mean people are anxious about what will happen, may miss crucial medication, go hungry or thirsty or be left in degrading conditions because the assistance they need to go to the toilet just isn’t there

Nobody would want their loved ones, or themselves, to experience care like this and it is crucial that the organisations commissioning or providing services work together to make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone.

 

To read the full report on the challenges facing home care, written by Andrea Sutcliffe (Chief Inspector of Adult Social Care at the Care Quality Commission), please click here.