Guidance Issued on £162.5 Million Workforce Recruitment and Retention Fund
post covid, the government has identified a gap in information, in health and social care particularly within the domiciliary care sector. now taking action and plans to invest in the sector to ensure users of health and social care are treated satisfactorily.
The Government has published guidance on the Workforce Recruitment and Retention Fund for adult social care 2021-22, announced on 21 October 2021. The grant circular sets out allocations, the grant conditions and guidance for local authorities and providers in England.
Councils are to use the funding to address adult social care workforce capacity pressures in their area through recruitment and retention activity this winter, to:
- support providers to maintain the provision of safe care and bolstering capacity within providers to deliver more hours of care
- support timely and safe discharge from hospital to where ongoing care and support is needed
- support providers to prevent admission to hospital
- enable timely new care provision in the community
- support and boost retention of staff within social care.
The activity must take place between 21 October 2021 and 31 March 2022.
It will be important to retain existing staff capacity as well as encourage new and returning entrants.
Domiciliary carers provide all types of services that a client would need in order to stay in their own home. This can include personal care such as washing and dressing, domestic tasks such as laundry and light cleaning, as well as running errands such as getting shopping or medications.
The need to reform adult social care funding is decades overdue and remains one of the biggest issues on the UK political landscape.
The sector entered the COVID-19 pandemic on the back foot, facing mounting levels of demand and unmet need, workforce shortages, an increasingly fragile provider market and tightening budgets. The pandemic has clearly highlighted weaknesses in the sector’s resilience and should act as a catalyst for reform. The shift in public perception of health and care services means there may never be a better time to address the relationship between state and individual and to consider what a reformed funding system for adult social care may look like.
Covid-19 has been the biggest challenge the health and care system has faced in living memory. It is essential that lessons are learned from this experience, whether from the necessary and extraordinary contributions of millions of staff and volunteers, the rapid progress achieved in digitising and transforming service delivery or from the shortcomings and inequalities brought sharply into focus.
Taking this into consideration, the Government has set out five priorities to help guide the approach to renewal across health and care:
- putting the workforce centre stage
- a step change on inequalities and population health
- lasting reform for social care
- embedding and accelerating digital change
- reshaping the relationship between communities and public services.
These areas will need to be prioritised by the government if it wishes to provide high-quality health and care services, improve population health and make good on its promises to ‘level up’ society. These priorities will also need to sit within a wider economic strategy that supports investment in the socio-economic determinants of health.
Covid-19 has laid bare the weaknesses in a social care system that has been underfunded and overlooked for too long. The sector was neglected by the government at the start of the pandemic, with tragic consequences for service users, families and staff, and unacceptable numbers of deaths.