More than half of care homes in Scotland are struggling to recruit staff, a national report has revealed
More than half of care homes in Scotland are struggling to recruit staff.
A joint report from the Care Inspectorate and the Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC) has revealed more than half of care homes for adults and older people have staff vacancies.
The study is based on the returns from 89% of 8,000 social care services across Scotland in 2017, which employed an estimated 179,1501 staff. A total of 38% of social care services reported vacancies, up two percentage points compared to the previous year.
Care at home services (62%), care homes for older people (59%), housing support services (59%) and care homes for adults (53%) were the main service types with the largest proportion of services reporting vacancies all significantly above the national average.
Daycare of children services (23%) was the only main service type where the vacancy rates were significantly below the national average.
At 31 December 2017, the rate of whole time equivalent (WTE) vacancies for all services in Scotland was 5.9% up from 5.5% in 2016. This was higher than the overall vacancy rate across all establishments in Scotland of 3.1%.
Gordon Weir, interim chief executive of the Care Inspectorate, said: “Our evidence suggests that having an effective and stable staff team is strongly associated with providing high-quality care.
“This allows trusting relationships to be developed between people providing and experiencing care, often supporting positive experiences and outcomes.
“The Care Inspectorate recognises that recruitment and retention into some parts of the social care sector remains a challenge, and we collect significant data about the places and parts of the sector where recruitment problems are more challenging.”
Lorraine Gray, chief executive of the SSSC said: “It is vital that social care continues to attract staff with the right values, skills and experience as well as filling vacancies.
“That’s why our work to promote careers, develop clear career pathways and professional frameworks for practice for social care and social work is so important. It all helps to establish social services as a career of choice with opportunities for gaining qualifications and real progression while helping to improve people’s lives.”
