Staffordshire Future Care Workforce Strategy

Keeping everyone in social care up to date

Working in children’s or adults’ social care is a vocation, with the whole workforce showing huge skill and commitment over the last two years.

But as demand for care and support grows across the country, partners across Staffordshire have taken the initiative to work together to develop a new wide-reaching workforce strategy to rise to the retention and recruitment challenge. This is about being innovative and bold in how we recruit the right people, celebrate your important contribution, make sure you feel valued and support your career development.

How to keep up to date on what’s happening on the development of the new strategy and the new approach:

Keep checking back to this website every fortnight when it will be updated (the second and final Friday of every month)
A ‘90 Second Update’ video from a member of the Countywide Partnership Taskforce, will be posted here on the last Friday of every month.
Would you like to know what’s happening with a notification straight into your inbox? Sign up to email list to receive a short email bulletin when these pages are updated.

What’s happened over the summer?

We’d like to thank everyone that has either had their say in the initial workforce survey, or took part in one of the focus groups.

Over 300 responses were received through the survey from organisations and individuals, and over 70 of our social care workforce came to the focus groups. This is a brilliant response – thank you all. Your passion for the work has shone through and is a great sign for the future.

Things we’re doing now:

Understanding the themes

We are now collating all of the feedback and taking our time to truly understand what this is telling us about what the future workforce strategy needs to cover. While it is early days in this process, a number of themes are beginning to become clear:

Our workforce is passionate but there are challenges, which people working in social care need help with.
Social care is a fantastic career choice with lots of opportunities for growth and development on the front line and into management, but we need to get better at promoting the sector and attracting the right people. Supporting our workforce’s health, wellbeing and development, and being supporting by strong leadership, are critical.
We are planning the next major milestones to engage with around the draft plan over the next few months. (addition)
We are starting to think about the promotion of the strategy – both short and long-term, to providers and current and the future workforce.

Benefits

Check out the developing ‘Get Yours’, our ‘Benefits’ page of discounts and benefits that you can use. If you know of any ‘benefits’ currently available and not listed, please let us know as this will be the first time that this information has been brought together.

Check out the developing Social Care Workforce Benefits page.

Did you know?

Occupational therapy career development in social care - "Be inspired, be inspirational

Tuesday 29 November, 10:00–12:25, via Zoom

Find out more about social care career development for occupational therapists. In partnership with the Royal College of Occupational Therapists, this event aims to inspire occupational therapists to recognise their potential and share the opportunities available to them.

Book your place

This week is Occupational Therapy Week, and the Royal College of Occupational Therapists is asking occupational therapists to share their life hacks to help others make positive changes