To deliver high-quality and inclusive social services, the working conditions of care professionals need to meet their needs. However, in the face of recent crises, such as Covid-19 or the invasion of Ukraine, which have added extra layers of stress to an already highly pressured workforce, providers and public authorities have struggled to retain care workers, as well as to attract new practitioners. This leads to limited human resources and a decrease in the quality of service delivery.
Care professionals face such high pressure due to numerous challenges: heavy case volumes, reduced local service access points, the lack of training and mentorship programmes, regular mismatch between needs of users and capacities of workers, as well as professionals and the overall sector being continuously undervalued.
In recent surveys of European Social Network (ESN) Members, 95% have identified workforce shortages as a pressing concern in their organisations. As a network committed to supporting its members, ESN has been increasingly working on this issue to help finding solutions that might enhance the sector’s resilience and attractiveness to future generations of professionals.
To that end, ESN and EY co-hosted a webinar titled ‘Future-Proofing Social Services: Innovation Amid Workforce Shortages’, to demonstrate how innovative tools and resources can tackle the vast range of issues faced by public authorities on this topic.
The importance of matching both needs and means
Whilst exchange of best practices on these issues is already happening within the network, the webinar highlighted, through the presentation of specific cases, how support occurs at different levels, namely at the workers’ level, the organisations’ level, and, finally, at the level of the public services’ ecosystem.
As understanding the needs of the workforce is a crucial first step, Catherine Maguire, Head of Workforce Development at the Northern Ireland Social Care Council, underlined the importance of research to identify and recognise the features that attract and retain care workers.
This was followed by the introduction of the Care in Practice Framework, which enabled the NISCC to develop structured professional follow-ups, build career pathways, and provide tailored training to allow professionals to gain new qualifications.
Furthermore, given the importance of fostering a strong organisational culture and developing management strategies that enhance the effectiveness of organisations, Corinne Hutmacher-Perret, Head of Fundamental Research Department, Deputy Managing Director of the Swiss Conference for Social Welfare (SKOS), presented the Caseload Converter, which calculates how to better allocate resources and tasks among workers. This includes reducing administrative burden and case volume to deliver better services. This calculator also allows recognition of the SROI (Social Return of Investment) of services, enabling service providers to advocate for more budget.
Cross-sector collaboration and bottom-up approaches bring transformative change
Emmanuelle Borrelly, Project Director, and Samuel Menoni, Project Manager at the Banque des Territoires, provided insights into the France Services project, established as a collaborative network for the different branches of public services.
The purpose is to have all services located in the same building, which facilitates service delivery, and improves accessibility for vulnerable populations such as older people. In the face of declining staff numbers, this project contributes to the sustainability of social services by reducing costs and restoring a human-centric approach to public services.
In addition, all panellists agreed that bottom-up approaches and the leveraging of local partnerships are both important, especially by including targeted populations and workers in decision-making and system design, to better address the challenges faced by professionals.
Conclusion: a vast range of solutions
As both Alfonso Lara-Montero, ESN’s Chief Executive Officer, and Jessica Chamba, EY Human Services Global Lead, argued, no single intervention can, alone, fully resolve workforce shortage issues. All these challenges are intertwined, and each organisation needs to find the solutions that best support their needs.
Speakers also acknowledged that while social services are doing their best with the funding and resources available, governments across Europe need to take a courageous stance against rising discourses calling for cuts to social welfare spending and stand for care support systems, crucial for a just and inclusive Europe.
