Care providers get £120m to spend on extra staff, as absence rates rise due to Covid

The government has announced that care homes and home care services in England struggling with rising absence rates due to Covid, will be able to access a £120m fund to pay for extra staff or to pay existing staff overtime.

The National Care Forum recently carried out a snapshot survey of care providers finding care homes were reporting staff absences of between 11 to 40 per cent with a few reporting absence levels as high as 50 per cent.

Absences were caused by a combination of COVID-19 positive cases being picked up by PCR testing, self-isolation following contact tracing, shielding and childcare responsibilities.

The £120m funding is designed to pay for extra care staff, support administrative tasks so experienced and skilled staff can focus on providing care and help existing staff to take on additional hours if they wish with overtime payments or by covering childcare costs.

In England, around 40 per cent of care home residents have now received their first vaccine dose, according to the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC).

Funding will bolster staff numbers in 'controlled and safe way'

Health and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock said: “This funding will bolster staffing numbers in a controlled and safe way, whilst ensuring people continue to receive the highest quality of care.

“Since the start of the pandemic, we have taken steps to protect care homes, including increasing the testing available for staff and residents, providing free PPE, and investing billions of pounds of additional funding for infection control.”

He added: “Help is on the way with the offer of a vaccine, with over forty percent of elderly care home residents having already received their first dose.”

Many local authorities across the country already have staffing initiatives in place to boost capacity and address staffing issues. These include care worker staff banks where new recruits are paid during training, re-deployment models where DBS checked staff are trained and moved into operational roles, and end-to-end training and recruitment services.

The new £120m fund will also pay for these initiatives to continue, and help other local authorities implement similar schemes.

Government announced £149m funding for testing in December

The £120m fund is in addition to the £149 million announced in December, which will be used to support rapid testing of staff testing and help set up safe testing areas and provide staff training. Minister for Care Helen Whately said: “This additional funding gives a boost to the social care workforce during some of the most difficult days of this pandemic so far.”

Care homes currently have access to three tests per week for their staff, with daily testing for seven days in the event of a positive case to protect staff and residents.

Martin Green, chief executive of Care England, would like to see the grant money to help with staff absences being used in a flexible way to support recruitment and retention.

He would like to see initiatives such as bonus payments for care workers to thank them for the work they have been doing during the pandemic, similar to those given in Scotland and Wales.

Other suggestions are ‘Golden Hello’ payments, care providers having access to local authority, NHS occupational health schemes and benefits and support around nurse placements or apprenticeship schemes.

Funding to support staffing must be flexible and rapid

Professor Green said: “We want to work with the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) to ensure that the Staff Capacity Fund delivers to the front line and is suitably flexible to reflect the crisis whereby providers are struggling with staff illness and absenteeism in the same way as their colleagues in the NHS are.

"Staff are our most precious resource and we want to do all that we can to support them especially in these incredibly difficult times.

“Care England has concerns about the delivery of funds to the front line owing to the quagmire of bureaucracy that prevented some of the money reaching the front line at the beginning of the pandemic. We look forward to the details in order to ensure that it can be used efficiently and effectively.”

Vic Rayner, chief executive of the National Care Form called the £120m funding announcement “welcome”.

She added: “Communities across the country desperately need care organisations to be properly supported now and in the future, so that they are ready and able to face every twist and turn of this pandemic.

"It is important that government has recognised the very real staffing crisis affecting social care – and the support on the table must be kept under constant review – this crisis is not going away anytime soon."

In the Adult Social Care Winter Plan the government proposed that limitations on staff movement between care homes will be enforced through regulations focused on care home providers.

Government rethinks plan to restrict movement of staff

In response to the announcement that the government has now decided not to bring forward this proposed legislation restricting the routine movement of staff, Ms Rayner said: “It is very important that the government has listened to the care sector and rowed back from its previous recommendation to use Care Quality Commission (CQC) regulation to prevent staff movement.

“It was an ill-thought through policy proposal, which targeted low paid care workers and created high level of concerns that people would be required to choose between health and care settings at a time when their skills and expertise were desperately needed. Care homes have been doing everything possible to reduce staff movement, and the prospect of regulatory enforcement was extremely unhelpful in a sector stretched to near breaking point.”

Deaths from COVID-19 in care homes

• In England, data from the Care Quality Commission (CQC) shows there have been 20,042 deaths of care home residents between 10 April 2020 and 8 January 2021.

• In Wales, Care Inspectorate Wales reported 1,269 deaths of care home residents between 1 March 2020 and 1 January 2021.

• In Scotland, the Care Inspectorate reported 1,097 deaths of care home residents between 25 May 2020 and 10 January 2021.