PEER LEARNING


Listening to care: Lessons emerging across the sector


Drawing on her year-round research for the Care Show conference programme, content producer Molly Benson explores the challenges keeping care providers up at night, and the practical lessons emerging from these conversations.


One of the privileges of producing the conference programme for Care Show is the opportunity to listen. Throughout the year, I speak to care providers, registered managers, commissioners, sector bodies, regulators, and other organisations working across social care to understand what is happening on the ground and, crucially, what care professionals need help with next. Those conversations ultimately shape what appears on the programme and stages, but they also provide a fascinating window into the sector more broadly, revealing questions and challenges that consistently emerge. How do we build a workforce that is equipped for what comes next? With changing CQC expectations, wider legal changes such as the Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards (DoLS) updates, AI and technology innovations, government plans for increased neighbourhood health and greater integration, how


do leaders keep their organisations learning and adapting while navigating all this change? Perhaps more interesting than these emerging challenges, however, is the attitudes towards them. Care leaders don’t just want to talk about what is going wrong; they want solutions; to know what somebody else is doing about it. What have other providers tried? What can they learn from it? Is there an idea they could adapt within their own organisation? That appetite for practical peer learning is


becoming increasingly important in a sector where there are rarely simple answers.


The workforce conversation is developing Recruitment inevitably remains part of the conversation, but some of the most useful discussions I have had this year have moved well beyond vacancy numbers. There is growing interest, for example, in widening the pool of people care recruits from. Rather than looking only for previous care experience, some organisations are considering the transferable skills people bring from hospitality, customer service, and other sectors. Particularly at entry level, providers are reporting that values, compassion, and potential can matter just as much as following a traditional route into care. That changes the question from ‘where do we find


more care workers?’ to ‘Who could become a brilliant care worker if we gave them the opportunity?’


42 THE CARE HOME INDUSTRY HANDBOOK 2027


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