Adult Social Care Update
A message from Gillian Keegan, Minister for Care and Mental Health Winter can be a challenging time. Many of us will be coming down from our festive highs, counting the cost of our dietary excesses, and impatiently waiting for the days to get longer and warmer!
As frontline care colleagues, you aren’t just contending with cold days and dark nights of course. There are others factors in play which can affect your mental wellbeing at any time of the year. During the course of the pandemic, you have lost colleagues, residents, family and friends to the virus and no doubt many of you have been taken ill yourselves. You wouldn’t be human if you hadn’t felt an emotional as well as physical burden in the midst of all this. In such circumstances, your resilience and dedication have been truly amazing.
Our Frontline continues to be a valuable source of wellbeing support for care staff, seven days a week. There is always someone to talk to if you’re feeling the strain, including the highly trained, compassionate and confidential volunteers staffing the Samaritans’ dedicated line for health and care workers.
Meanwhile, we have released additional funding to support the workforce through these tough times. We recently announced £5.4 billion to reform social care over the next three years, including at least £500 million to support training and career development for the workforce. This is on top of £462.5 million to support recruitment and retention of staff.
On that point, easing pressure on the workforce remains a top priority. This week, we’ve teamed up with some famous faces, as part of the ‘Made with Care’ campaign to shine a light on the extraordinary parts of working in care not often spoken about. Find out more in this newsletter and on our Facebook page.
With more than 105,000 vacancies, and almost half-a-million extra job opportunities in adult social care expected by 2035, the campaign aims to help fill vacancies across the adult social care sector, encouraging people to apply for exciting and rewarding roles across the country.
If you know someone with huge reserves of empathy, compassion and patience, why not ask them to consider a career in care? With the benefit of excellent on-the-job training, they don’t need qualifications. There are flexible roles available and many opportunities to progress.
Reforming the care sector isn’t just about process and protocols, it’s about people too. We will support new and existing colleagues to build careers as transformative and inspiring as the care they give to others.
Made with Care: famous faces share positive stories As part of the Made with Care recruitment campaign to fill around 105,000 sector vacancies, some well-known faces are inspiring more people to consider careers in adult social care.
Christine McGuinness, Ade Adepitan (pictured), Lady Leshurr and Toni Tone have all published powerful job descriptions of what it means to work in care and how it has made a difference in their lives and those closest to them.
Ade Adepitan, paralympic medalist, journalist and TV presenter said on twitter: "Adult social care workers have changed our family’s life... If you think you too could make a difference in not one, but many people’s lives, visit Adult Social Care to find a job that makes you proud."
Winter vaccination campaign: COVID-19 booster resources and pregnancy case studies [Image created by freepik.com] A reminder to make full use of a communications toolkit designed to support social care colleagues to run their own winter vaccinations campaigns. Encourage your care colleagues to get the flu vaccine and COVID-19 booster with these free resources.
New booster materials have been added, including content on reducing the risk of long covid. New pregnancy animated social media case studies have also been uploaded.
COVID-19 guidance update: Vaccination as condition of deployment across care settings [Image created by freepik.com] On 14 December 2021, Parliament agreed regulations, which extend vaccination as a condition of deployment beyond residential care settings to any other Care Quality Commission (CQC) regulated activity in health and social care, subject to certain exemptions and conditions. This guidance relates to the way these regulations apply in wider adult social care settings, including home (domiciliary) care, extra-care housing and supported living.
Operational guidance relating to the vaccination of people working or deployed in care homes has also been updated.
Registered nursing: report shines light on important care sector role [Photo by Georg Arthur Pflueger on Unsplash] A new report, gathering evidence to support the value and effectiveness of registered nursing in social care, has been published by the NIHR Policy Research Unit, King’s College London.
Featuring a foreword from Chief Nurse for Adult Social Care, Deborah Sturdy, the report provides an overview of current literature and available evidence, paving the way for further exploration about the responsibilities, complexities and responsiveness of social care nursing.
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