Size of North Yorkshire's Social Care Staffing Issues Underlined

The gravity of the staffing crisis in social care has been underlined as North Yorkshire county council launches its biggest ever recruitment drive in response to plummeting numbers applying for social care jobs.

There has been a 70 per cent drop in applications for jobs in social care across the 500 providers in the county since July and providers are continuing to go out of business, partly due to staff costs.

Sharon Moss runs a care home and says filling roles is really difficult.

On any given day there are at least 1,000 jobs available across the county.

In an attempt to fill the vacancies, providers in the county are offering extra financial incentives to staff to take on the roles, from a £1,500 golden handshake for a care setting nursing role in Northallerton to carers being offered £2,000 for referring three friends.

Across the county North Yorkshire has 20,000 people working in the care sector, from the 13,000 care and support workers in 500 organisations providing services in residential care and people’s homes through to social workers, project managers and administrators.

A full meeting of North Yorkshire County Council next week will hear at least three of its executive members highlight concerns over the 70 per cent drop in applications for jobs in social care.

The warnings come after the authority said it was having to intervene in a number of care homes to keep them staffed and the government undertook to provide workforce recruitment and retention funding to support local authorities and providers to recruit and retain sufficient staff over winter.

In a statement to the meeting, the authority’s leader, Councillor Carl Les, says:

“I am pleased that as the government launches a nationwide initiative we are undertaking more locally the biggest ever recruitment campaign to attract people into a rewarding and progressive career.”

The council has recently warned the situation would only worsen with about 200 fewer care workers in the county due to rules requiring all care workers to be vaccinated.

Before Thursday’s (November 11) deadline numerous foreign-born care staff in North Yorkshire had stated to leave the UK if they had to have the Covid jab to work.

Care workers have also suggested the lack of pay progression, with staff with more than five years’ experience being paid just 6p more an hour than those with less than a year in the role in 2020-21 is a cause of recruitment difficulties.

In a statement to the meeting, Councillor Michael Harrison, the authority’s adult social care executive member says the county’s situation reflects fierce competition within the labour market alongside hospitality, retail, heavy goods transport and construction.

He says:

“Pressures are building within nursing, residential home and domiciliary care capacity as a result of workforce pressures within the external market, and we continue to see provider failures in the system.

“Packages of care are being handed back to the council to either re-source or find alternative solutions to keep people safe. This is putting significant pressure on and impacting our in-house provision as we try to find solutions for people or fill the gaps using staff from our services.

“This is impacting our ability to provide reablement and respite services. Complex care packages are being handed back at short notice alongside those requiring two carers or in more rural locations. In addition we are seeing care home providers withdraw from providing nursing care or withdraw completely from the market.”

However Cllr Harrison says the announcement this week that NHS staff are going to have to be double jabbed to work in the service from the spring might take some pressure off the recruitment issues being faced by the care sector.

Rules meaning that care staff have to be double jabbed came in to force this week.

Councillor Harrison says the change should help reduce a drain of staff from care to the NHS.