Continuous improvement and staff retention in social care
In July 2024, Skills for Care – the strategic workforce development and planning body for adult social care in England – published a Workforce Strategy. It’s the first time the adult social care sector has come together to set out priorities for their workforce – a task that was urgently needed.
Latest data from the King’s Fund shows that demand for adult social care is growing, but the workforce is not keeping pace with this demand. In 2022/23, there were 1.79 million adult social care roles in England: 1.635 million filled posts and 152,000 vacancies. Yet despite a substantial increase in international recruitment, vacancies remain high.
These statistics also show that turnover among adult social care staff is 28.3% – with care workers and nurses showing particularly high rates at 35.6% and 32.6% respectively. Staff retention in social care remains a huge challenge for a sector where a familiar face can have a hugely positive impact on those using the service, and where there is great value in retaining trained staff.
Listening to the adult social care workforce
The new Skills for Care Workforce Strategy rightly highlights ‘attract and retain’ as one of its three priority categories. It discusses how the dispersed nature of the adult social care sector means that listening to the workforce is key to creating a supported and motivated workforce; and acknowledges that whilst the wellbeing of parts of the adult social care workforce are understood, there is no regular survey to the broader workforce so significant gaps in understanding remain.
Alongside the new workforce strategy, Skills for Care’s recent #KeepTheRightPeople campaign focuses on staff retention in social care and includes ‘creating a positive place to work’ as a crucial way to do this. Case studies highlight two examples of this – firstly, running staff surveys, and secondly, fostering a culture of asking for people’s ideas and feedback. In the first case study we learn about Norfolk County Council’s staff engagement survey, and in the second, we hear from an epilepsy care home, where listening to staff ideas and feedback had a significant impact on retention: “I had one support worker who told me she was only going to be here for six months, well she’s still here over 10 years later. The average length of time our staff work with us here is 14 years,” shared the service manager.
A digital solution to engage the workforce in continuous improvement
ImproveWell is a platform for engaging frontline workers to get real-time feedback, proven to improve staff retention in social care. Giving everyone a voice, ImproveWell makes it simple for organisations to capture continuous, real-time insight to improve staff experience and the quality of care.
Its approach is grounded in three principles: those at the frontline are best placed to improve the systems around them; giving staff a voice and the agency to find solutions to the challenges they face is fundamental to building a collaborative, motivated, resilient and retained workforce; and a happier workforce leads to better patient outcomes.
Providing a platform for everyone to share improvement ideas, highlight factors affecting their workday, and respond to surveys 24/7, the digital solution empowers the entire workforce to play a part in driving change.
At the Rosebrook Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU), part of Southern Health and Social Care Trust, retention was identified as a huge issue and the unit was caught in a cycle of trying the same solutions to challenges that were repeatedly reported, which meant staff morale was very low. Following the implementation of ImproveWell, the team retained 100% staff members over a period of 12 months, and recruitment was more successful.
Improvement in adult social care
Robust measurement and feedback mechanisms are crucial for engaging and retaining staff, but ultimately will also lead to improvement. A 2022 King’s Fund report showed huge variety in the approach to improvement across adult social care. There was a lack of a shared language or codified set of methods for improvement. They stated that the lack of consistency and standardised approaches led to improvement activity that was reactive, focused on short-term fixes and where data and measurement were lacking.
The Care Quality Commission (CQC), the independent regulator of health and adult social care in England, has rolled out its new single assessment framework. The new framework will continue to use five key questions (is the service safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led?) and its existing four-point ratings scale (outstanding, good, requires improvement and inadequate). It now also includes six new evidence categories, and crucially, half of these new CQC categories rely on gathering robust feedback.
WIth the new and urgently needed focus on retention in adult social care, there has never been a better time to invest in robust mechanisms and measurements for staff feedback – evidence suggests it will not only help retention, but could play a key role in improving CQC reporting and ratings.
Discover more out more about the ImproveWell solution here.
