Quality of care
Why quality of care comes down to the whole team
Following the publication of the Care Quality Commission (CQC) State of Care report, Fay Gibbin, CEO at BB Training Academy, is encouraging care homes to make training a priority to drive quality of care in the sector and give more carers the opportunity to progress
When the CQC report, ‘The State of Health Care and Adult Social Care in England 2017/18’ was published in October 2018, it came as the adult social care system in the UK approached tipping point. The report’s findings went hand in hand with concerns being echoed across a sector in crisis. Its findings included an ‘integration lottery’, a term used to describe ineffective collaboration between services that is leading to disjointed care for local communities. It also spoke of growing concerns surrounding funding, capacity and the workforce.1 While the report did include some positive points – such as how quality of care has been maintained or even improved in some parts of the country – it looked at many areas that the government, sector leaders and service providers are tackling to build an effective adult social care system that works for the individuals who need it most.
One key point the report highlighted is that the workforce in adult social care is “absolutely crucial”. As with all forms of healthcare, the whole system is dependent on having skilled people who can deliver the right care to meet the needs of individuals.
It’s no secret that many independent and local authority funded services are facing challenges in relation to the recruitment and retention of staff, which in turn can have an adverse impact on the quality of care provided. In fact, the current vacancy rate in the adult social care sector is eight per cent, indicating that as many as 110,000 jobs remain unfilled.2
This situation is the result of many different factors. For some, wages are just too low considering the type of work care staff are expected to perform and some believe finding people with the right values is a challenge, while others
feel there are a lack of training and opportunities for progression for care workers in the sector. In many settings, all of these factors are at play.
Access to training
It appears that there are many care homes throughout the UK that still don’t provide access to training or a clear career pathway for their workforce and this is a real concern. Restricted budgets indicate that some care settings are focusing on frontline activities and are not planning for the long term. All too often, career planning and training are pushed to the bottom of the list of priorities in order to save money, but this is false economy. A workforce that doesn’t receive ongoing training, or more worryingly hasn’t had any training to date, is likely to face more emergencies in the care setting, which is in turn likely to result in other ongoing costs. When you look at the figures, the number of care workers who have had training or gained relevant qualifications is nowhere near what it should be. According to the Skills for Care report,3 47 per cent of care workers who provide direct care do not hold any relevant qualifications in adult social care. When you consider budget cuts and the confusion around funding for training, you begin to understand why this number is so low. However, when you look at it from the perspective of the individuals who need top quality care, you see why there must be a significant boost in the number of care workers who undertake regular training.
Issues with staff retention lead back to poor quality of care and there is a strong link between retention and training. The report by Skills for Care states that 21.7 per cent of care workers who held a relevant qualification in 2017/18 left their role in the following 12 months. For care workers who hadn’t
January 2019 •
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