Jon Glasby, IMPACT’s Director, updates on IMPACT’s work and how we have been sharing our learning with others.
Earlier this year ‘Ask IMPACT’ published its first guide on the recruitment and retention of staff in social care. These are designed to be evidence-informed and trusted, but also accessible and practical. We were delighted with the way this circulated and the positive responses we received. We’d also value your feedback as to how you’ve used the guide in practice.
Supporting the people who work in adult social care was also one of the key priorities that came out of the national survey we conducted in 2022. We’ve been running a series of practical projects all over the UK on topics like values-based recruitment, supporting the emotional well-being of care workers, recruiting more men into care work, and the health and well-being of personal assistants. Next year, we’re also hoping to be working on topics like anti-racism and on tackling the discrimination and abuse that some staff experience in the course of their work.
Wherever possible, we’ve tried to share the things we’re starting to learn with others, so that the sector as a whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. We’ve had really positive relationships with the social care skills/workforce councils in different nations of the UK, with partners like BASW and the Royal College of Occupational Therapists (who sit on our Leadership Team and are part of our broader Consortium respectively) and with a number of other partners and colleagues working on recruitment and retention more generally.
This has included contributing to the fantastic ‘Love Care’ campaign run by Devon, to celebrate what’s great about care and encourage more of us to value care for the kinds of lives it helps us lead together. We also really enjoyed this year’s Professional Care Workers Week, taking part in policy roundtables and direct discussions with care workers around the types of support that would work best for them. At the same time, a charitable funder with whom we’ve been linking informally – the Rayne Foundation – has announced a new £2 million grant-making programme, Better Careers for Better Care. For people interested in finding out more, there’s an initial blog on this work from Rayne’s Susan O’Sullivan, which sets out the journey they’ve been on to design this support in a way that will hopefully maximise the benefits for the sector as a whole – and particularly for care workers.
Throughout the development of the programme, we’ve been grateful for the opportunity to stay in touch, and feed in any informal lessons that we’ve learned from our own national programmes. Social care can sometimes be fragmented – and we’re very conscious that we learnt so much from the generosity of others, and now need to make sure that we do the same.