02 Aug Skills for Care launch monthly workforce trackers to chart social care workforce trends and COVID-19 impact in East England
Skills for Care has launched new monthly workforce trackers offering adult social care employers an ongoing source for monitoring workforce trends.
The online tool also allows care providers, policy makers and individuals to monitor workforce national and regional trends.
The trackers use the organisation’s latest ‘Size and structure of the adult social care workforce in England’ data to track key trends like vacancies, number of jobs, and days lost to sickness that can be charted on a monthly basis.
The tool can be filtered to view data for each region across England. The flexible system provides a number of important insights on the adult social care workforce, including charting the impact COVID-19 is having on the workforce.
Skills for Care will continue to develop the new tracking tool in response to any further changes in policy and conditions for the social care workforce.
The data shows that before COVID-19 around 2.6% of days were lost to sickness nationally, but since COVID-19 this figure has risen to 5%.
In East England the number of days lost to sickness since COVID-19 is 4.8%.
Nationally, vacancy rates are lower than they were pre-covid at a rate of 7.4%.
In East England the current vacancy rate is 8.8%.
The data shows that there has been a decrease in jobs in adult social care between March 2021 to June 2021 nationwide.
Skills for Care CEO Oonagh Smyth said:
“Thanks to the continued support of thousands of social care employers who kept supplying their data to the Skills for Care Adult Social Care Workforce Data Set through the pandemic we are able to publish annual and now monthly analysis.
“The monthly workforce trackers provide those employers with an easy way to keep up-to-date with workforce data on a monthly basis and understand the impact of the pandemic on our colleagues who have done so much to support us, our families, friends and communities.”
