Social Care Workforce Research Initiative Seminar
18 November 2008: Notes from the seminar
These notes were made during the day itself by participants.
Users’ Panel – summary of points made
The attitudes and skills of social care workers are important to service users,
although paper-based qualifications are not necessarily the best indicator of
whether a person will be able to give the right assistance. There is a need for
awareness training.
Constant bureaucratic re-organisations and new initiatives are disruptive for
managers and front-line staff, and so can have negative effects for service
users. Service users, and the staff who work directly with them, can be
“experts by experience” but change rarely seems to be “bottom up”.
Older people find that services do not now seem to be available as easily as
they were in the past. The situation seems to be getting worse. The current
generation of working age needs to take note. Their turn will come. Most of
the people who care for older people are also older people.
The idea of personalisation has yet to prove itself to be a genuine increase in
choice. It could potentially have a big impact, but people have become
sceptical about changes. The expected large increase in the numbers of
people who work as personal assistants will raise questions about how
personal assistants will be able to access support if they need it, and the
registration system, as it now operates, creates uncertainty for the future
about the important safeguards that should be available to people who wish to
employ their own assistants.
User involvement, and a concern for the rights of people who use services is
a growing theme at every level: local, national and international. Relevant
examples are the UN Convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities, as
well as the Equality Act the Human Rights Act in the UK. In general these are
welcome developments, but it can be difficult for service users to be clear
about what their rights are in this rapidly changing world.
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Afternoon discussion groups
Group one
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Data Set - Not mandatory. How comprehensive?
Evidence base - Snapshots - right picture? Weak
Workforce research - lack of capacity. Need for more user-led
research on workforce and worker led.
Qualitative - More of!
Co-ordination of research/mapping.
Accessibility of research - target channels and audiences.
Review and dissemination capacity.
Register - Club for workers, isolated application. Atomisation?
Key Issues
Motivation/messages (recruitment and retain)
Inputs → outputs
Identifying workers training needs
Integration – responding to different roles/identities/tensions in the
system
Group two
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Service users and carers involvement in the shaping of the strategy
and the next stage.
What are the themes around diversity? Intra-country and inter-country.
How these could be drawn out in reports/strategy.
Request for an event on the strategy – looking at links and
developments between projects - summer 2009.
Is there a shared understanding around language –e.g. stakeholders?
Cross-cutting themes e.g. labour market, agency workers, migrant
workers etc. How they are picked up?
David Challis group
The following observations are drawn from the discussion which ranged
broadly over issues related to the workforce but also more broadly across the
whole development of social care initiatives.
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We saw the need to place discussion of workforce related research in
the context of the expected DH Workforce strategy. However, it was
also important to nest that discussion in the light of the Green Paper on
the funding of Social Care. The funding changes may well identify
areas where
A second broad level observation was that most policy documents and
plans for the social care workforce reflected the context of full and
stable employment from the late 1990s to 2007. In such a setting the
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paramount pressure of recruitment and retention for social care
compared with other employment opportunities was acute. In the
current economic climate where recruitment for groups such as
teachers has improved there may be effects upon social care. We
need therefore to focus not upon the factors endogenous to social care
that affect its workforce, as has been the case hitherto, but also the
exogenous factors which may be equivalently influential to its
development.
Research opportunities and requirements of relevance to this field
need to reflect the changing and unsure context. One strategy would
be to develop a stream of work which undertook ongoing monitoring to
identify trends and changing patterns. This could be linked to the
NMDS, and incorporate routine outcome measures and other data
specially collected on a standard basis.
The impact of personalisation developments was discussed.
The balance of training as a self development, competence enhancing
and learning opportunity as opposed to the achievement of
qualifications was discussed. A barrier to the qualification hierarchy in
social care was seen as the inadequate rewards hierarchy for
individuals achieving qualifications. In essence, there appeared to be a
poor relationship between level of qualification and associated potential
job reward.
A need was identified for greater clarity as to what constituted the
social care workforce and whether it was an identifiable (or identifiable
with) phenomenon. Organisationally in some local authorities Adult
Social Care is linked with other parts of the organisation such as
leisure, which provides an unclear focus. Staff may feel more
comfortable working within more meaningful sub-groupings such as
dementia care.
Patterns of supply of the workforce are usually perceived
pessimistically. One possible countervailing effect may be the
recruitment of new people in to the workforce as “person-specific
personal assistants or support workers” (PSPAs) as opposed to more
generic staff. Such people will only enter the workforce to care for an
identified individual, usually part of their social network. Whilst a
potentially small effect, its magnitude is worthy of research.
Helen Rainbird group
Factors helping or hindering taking the Department of Health’s workforce
strategy forward.
Training for care home owners - expectations of organisations.
Registered Managers - definite qualification requirements NVQ4 in Care Howard’s Case Studies do. How it trickles down in terms of standards for the
home and quality of outcomes.
Link to understanding needs of diverse workforce and service users.
Need to address issues in curriculum.
More off the job underpinning training at NVQ4.
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NVQ just gone through incremental review for levels 2, 3, 4. Skills set on
dementia. Update for personalisation agenda.
How managers facilitate the development of workers.
Performance / outcomes / outcomes based practise.
Understand the relationship between research and evidence - based practice
& outcomes for users is the research challenge.
Processes / systems / inputs are important as well as outcomes.
Need to prevent dogma taking over as policy.
Discourses are on outcomes - CSCI their approach compare this to Ofsted.
Shift to ‘light touch’ inspection.
But what about inputs?
National Minimum standards are putting more emphasis on outcomes.
Evidence point of view - what does this really mean? - Ideologically rather
than research based.
Good quality workers / good quality services - what defines good quality for
workers?
What makes a happy service user?
Constructing a world around outcomes - denies other bits exist and linkages.
Criteria for good outcomes - how can you identify inputs?
‘person-centred care’ - is the person at centre?
Need evaluation.
Current model of commissioning and contract
providers find it restrictive.
outcomes approach - provider can get on with it as they see fit.
What is preferred by the worker? - This is an issue if we were concerned
about recruitment and retention.
Need input and out put approach.
The National Minimum Data Set - as tool to use with providers i.e. address
common standards in managing workforce rather than each local authority
making own decisions → feelings of unfairness amongst workforce.
Incentives for workforce - meaningful for the future.
Completion of the National Minimum Data Set should be obligatory and
should represent a national minimum standard.
Management matters and criteria for judging performance of organisation
matter.
We stand on cusp of change in regulatory system which is problematic.
Link to research
We need to understand relationships between inputs and outputs.
How does input of workforce affect outcomes?
Inputs, process and outcomes.
RESPECT - for workforce and service users.
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Management matters - this represents the process which needs to be
understood.
Criteria matter.
The relationship Organisation and the locality matter too.
Research into workforce should be linked to research into carers.
This raises deeper questions relating to the link paid / unpaid care formal /
informal and publicly funded / privately funded care.
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