Cutting recruitment time crucial to ending care worker crisis

Fast-tracking the recruitment of care workers is crucial in helping end the care worker crisis in the Scotland and the UK, according to Stephen Wilson, CEO of Novacare Edinburgh, a software company dedicated to providing a suite of digital solutions to the Care Industry.

Stephen Wilson, a recruitment expert and industry insider with over 30 years professional experience in the health and social care sector, believes the current hiring process is exacerbating rather than solving staffing issues.

“A sustainable health and social care sector needs to rethink its recruitment strategy, and soon,” he said. “Currently in Scotland, it can take 10 weeks, including laborious disclosure and barring checks, or more to fill a single care home vacancy. That’s hundreds of valuable hours eaten up by a traditional recruitment process that’s as inflexible and inefficient as it is time-consuming. Plus, because very few care providers have personnel dedicated solely to the task of hiring staff, recruitment is likely to be one of many jobs being juggled by an overstretched team or even just one, single, multi-tasking manager.

Scottish Care, the voice of the independent care sector, agrees. In its 2018 report, The 4 Rs, the vacancy level in the Care Industry was 31%, up from 28% in 2016. It states that since 2015, the job vacancy trend in the Care Industry is getting worse year-on-year with a worrying upward trend.

Stephen Wilson said he believes lack of time and manual, old-fashioned methods of recruiting and monitoring care workers are key factors in the big picture of the rise of care worker vacancies in Scotland.

He said the impact of lengthy admin-heavy processes in recruiting quality staff was affecting the entire health and social care industry.

“We work with Health and Social Care partnerships across Scotland and we understand and recognise how the lack of digitisation in the industry is causing problems in the recruitment of new care workers. One example is the delayed discharge crisis hitting NHS Scotland which costs the NHS in the region of £125 million a year, an average of £234 per bed, per day, because medically fit people cannot leave hospital until their care provision has been put in place. With high job vacancy rates in the Care Industry, NHS Scotland is just one of the bodies affected.”

In February 2019, 40,813 days were spent in hospital by people whose discharge was delayed. This is an increase of 6% compared with 38,394 days in February 2018. At the February 2019 census point, there were 1,419 people delayed. This is an increase of 9% compared with 1,297 delayed at the census point in February 2018. Of those delayed at the February 2019 census point, 1,122 were delayed more than three days. The most common reason for delays over three days was health and social care reasons (72%, 808), followed by complex needs (24%, 267), then patient and family-related reasons (4%, 47).

Stephen Wilson said: “Ironically, staff shortages are also leading to committed, experienced, high quality staff leaving the care industry to work in other fields, simply because the pressure of long hours and extra shifts, often combined with fulfilling several different roles, eventually becomes insupportable. The quick, painless recruitment of qualified, high quality, fully vetted men and women into the Care Industry will reduce the pressure on Care teams immeasurably and go a long way to reversing the upward trend, in favour of a fuller employment picture. No one solution will fix the problem in its entirety, but digitisation will help enormously. Cutting the recruitment process down from 10 weeks to 24-hours – possible with digitisation - will bring the Care Industry recruitment drive into the 21st century and push the industry forward as one of the top places to work. Everybody wins.”

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About Novacare:

Novacare aims to fundamentally disrupt the way in which the health and social care sector operates.

30 years of experience sits behind our integrated suite of SaaS solutions, which allows providers to focus on their key priority, delivering better outcomes for those they support. By significantly reducing the cost/administrative burden of recruitment; ensuring legal and regulatory compliance, providing real time reporting, staff planning and resource management, Novacare is transforming the way staff are recruited. Novacare’s software is intentionally designed for both large corporates as well as independents, thereby targeting the entire population (c.25,000) of UK care providers and beyond.

Novacare

https://www.nova-care.uk/

39 Hanover Street

Edinburgh

EH2 2PJ

United Kingdom

Phone: 0131 510 4003

Press enquiries: Joanna Chumas at Sugazizz –joanna.chuma@gmail.com 07342 872 342


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About Novacare

About Novacare: Novacare is a tech start-up that aims to fundamentally disrupt the way in which the health and social care sector operates.30 years of experience sits behind our integrated suite of SaaS solutions, which allows providers to focus on their key priority, delivering better outcomes for those they support. By significantly reducing the cost/administrative burden of recruitment; ensuring legal and regulatory compliance, providing real time reporting, staff planning and resource management, Novacare is transforming the way staff are recruited. Novacare’s software is intentionally designed for both large corporates as well as independents, thereby targeting the entire population (c.25,000) of UK care providers and beyond.