Adult Social Care Workforce

We want to hear your views on the challenges facing the adult social care workforce in Oxfordshire. Particularly, we would like your views on the objectives and principles that have been proposed to help shape a shared delivery plan to address these challenges.

Please read our discussion document and take this opportunity to have your say.

Introduction

We want to support people to live happy, healthy lives here in Oxfordshire.

We’re taking an innovative approach to delivering adult social care, putting individuals at the heart of everything we do. We work with partners in the NHS as well as voluntary and community groups, to help people to live well, within their own communities for longer. It’s something we call the Oxfordshire Way.

People who work in adult social care play a crucial role in delivering the Oxfordshire Way approach, ensuring consistent, good quality, care and support is provided. Every day, their dedication and commitment make a positive difference to the lives of those people they help and support.

The Oxfordshire Way approach is about focusing on what’s strong, rather than what’s wrong. However, we know that all employers in the social care sector in Oxfordshire report significant workforce challenges, that can be attributed to four main factors:

• Increasing demand for care and support, as the population of Oxfordshire grows and ages.
• Challenges in recruiting new entrants to social care.
• Increasing skill levels required for adult social care work, as people’s needs become more complex.
• Challenges in retaining staff in the sector due to comparable or better pay in other sectors, for less demanding roles.

We have developed a discussion document in collaboration with key stakeholders, including care providers, which sets out in more detail the challenges facing the workforce and how together, we plan to respond to these.

We would like your feedback on this discussion document so we can shape a delivery plan that both recognises the challenges facing the social care workforce in Oxfordshire; and defines the actions we need to take over the next three years. This will help to ensure the county has a highly skilled, resilient and diverse workforce that can provide quality care and support to residents who need help and support.

Specifically, we want you to tell us:

• If there is anything you think we have missed, or if there are other challenges we should take into account
• If the objectives and principles we have developed to support the development of keys actions are the right ones, or if there is anything missing to to address these challenges and support providers and the workforce who deliver social care.

You can read the discussion document on this page.

Please share your views in the survey below.