More work is needed to increase retention and grow recruitment in the social care sector, the minister for care has said.
Speaking earlier today at the Care England annual conference, Stephen Kinnock said social care staff deserve ‘greater dignity’ and more opportunities to develop within the sector.
Mr Kinnock outlined how fair pay, additional training and joining up health and care services were all crucial to ‘building for the future’ of social care.
‘We need to do much, much more to drive retention, to grow our recruitment and create careers of dignity and opportunity,’ he said.
Mr Kinnock’s speech was cut short by the news that NHS England (NHSE) was being scrapped and would be brought back into the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), to reinvest more money into frontline services.
Technology and data
The minister also outlined how there was a ‘huge opportunity’ in technology and data innovation, to ‘build together for the future that we value better’.
And he stressed the government’s commitment to increase the use of digital social care records by registered providers up to 75%, and to ‘test scale and evaluate’ the use of more care technology across the industry.
‘It is our ambition that all care providers will be fully digitised by the end of this Parliament,’ he said.
Thus digital push was ‘not just about efficiency’ but would also enhance the quality of care provision and support more residents to live independently, Mr Kinnock suggested.
‘It’s about the dignity, the joy and humanity in those small spaces in our lives,’ he added.
National Insurance rises
Mr Kinnock described the government’s decision to increase National Insurance (NI) contributions in the Autumn budget as ‘an extremely challenging decision’ and acknowledged the ‘financial strain’ this had put on care providers.
‘First, we know that this has placed greater financial strain on care providers. Second, the entire government wishes that we didn’t have to do what we did, but we did.
‘Third, the current economic and international reality when we entered government means that we cannot sprint towards our vision of the future,’ he said
Mr Kinnock said the government’s decision to raise NI contributions did not ‘lessen commitment to the future’ but made it ‘more determined see transformation’.
‘We want to build a social care system that works and is sustainable, a system that both adds years to our lives and life to our years, because the quality of our lives is as important as the length of our lives,’ he added.
Earlier this month, the government announced that the amount of NHS funding it gives care homes providing nursing care will increase by 7.7% from April 1.
Last month, the House of Lords voted to exempt social care providers from national insurance rises.
Last October Professor Deborah Sturdy, England’s chief nurse for adult social care, said she and Mr Kinnock were ‘very united’ on delivering more social care nursing placements for students.
