Adult social care workforce survey: December 2021 report
This report documents key findings from the responses collected from almost 9,000 adult social care settings in England through the workforce survey. This represents a response rate of 27% of all Care Quality Commission (CQC)-registered care homes and 44% of all CQC-registered domiciliary care providers.
Most respondents to the survey reported an increase in challenges in the 4 key areas of recruiting staff, retaining staff, morale and accessing agency staff, over the last 6 months.
The positions reported as being hard to recruit were also reported as hard to retain. For domiciliary care providers the role most commonly reported as challenging to recruit and to retain was ‘personal assistant or home care worker’. For care homes this was ‘senior care worker’.
The main reason given for these shortages is that respondents feel pay and working conditions in the care sector are uncompetitive, when compared to outside sectors. Vaccination as a condition of deployment was also cited as a potential issue for care homes.