Social care workers should receive an immediate bonus of up to £1,000 to stop them quitting before the winter and putting even more pressure on the NHS, ministers are being urged.
The Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (ADASS) and NHS Providers, which represents hospitals, say emergency payments would help tackle worsening staff shortages.
Their plea comes as new figures show that hospitals across the UK cannot fill almost half of the number of consultant posts they advertise – the highest number for eight years.
Growing numbers of care home personnel and domiciliary care workers in England are leaving to work for delivery firms such as Amazon, in hospitality, or in other sectors, leading to warnings that already fragile services may become unsustainable unless the exodus is halted.
Stephen Chandler, the president of ADASS, said: “Paying a £1,000 bonus to care workers over the winter would show that we prize their skills and dedication as a society.” He added that care workers in England were the only ones not to receive a bonus for working during Covid.
NHS Providers suggested a lower figure – at least £500 – but pleaded with ministers to accept the urgency of the need to stem the loss of so many personnel from the sector before it was too late.
“With 1.5 million social care staff that [a £500 bonus] comes to a total of £750m, which is a huge amount of money. A sum of this size would need to be a draw on the government reserve,” said Chris Hopson, the organisation’s chief executive.
“It’s this kind of immediate, emergency action that government needs to be thinking about in the next fortnight because our health and care system has to stop the current flow of people leaving social care into other industries like retail, hospitality and logistics.”
With Amazon and other firms offering bonuses to help them recruit workers for the Christmas rush, a “retention bonus” was vital because “if we don’t stop the loss of social care staff, that will be a real issue and it needs to be looked at really quickly”, Hopson added.
A new census of hospital doctors across the UK found that 48% of posts for consultants (senior doctors) went unfilled last year, up from 36% in 2013.
The Royal College of Physicians, Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh and Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow said the main problem was a lack of applicants.
Wales had the highest proportion of unfilled posts (59%). In England it was 46% but that masked significant regional variation. While only 38% of posts in London stayed vacant, in the east Midlands it was 63% and 61% in the West Midlands.
“We’re being hit by a perfect storm of high demand for services and not enough staff. This can’t go on,” said Prof Andrew Goddard, president of the Royal College of Physicians.
“The fact that so many posts were unfilled because there were no applicants shows the supply of doctors falls woefully short of demand.” He asked ministers to agree to fund an expansion of medical school places in order to train more homegrown doctors to help boost the workforce.
There is also concern that almost 14,000 nurses and midwives stopped working in the NHS between April and September, a big increase on the 11,020 who did so in the same period in 2020.
Andrea Sutcliffe, the chief executive of the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC), said it was “concerning” that the number of UK nationals becoming nurses and midwives had fallen from 14,410 between April-September 2020 to 13,078 in the same six months this year.
She welcomed the fact that the total number of nurses and midwives on the NMC’s register had risen again, this time to 744,929. But, she added: “In the face of rising needs across the UK there are worrying signs this pace of growth won’t meet demand.”
The former health secretary Jeremy Hunt will on Tuesday try to force the current holder of the office, Sajid Javid, to publish an independent projection every two years of how many staff the NHS needs and update on progress towards delivering the numbers needed.
Hunt, who chairs the Commons health select committee, will lay an amendment to the health and care bill that is going through parliament. Almost 50 health organisations and 38 MPs – including 19 Tories, all opposition parties and eight select committee chairs – are backing the move.
“With shortages in every single medical speciality and lots of additional money going into the NHS it makes no sense to ignore the elephant in the room, which is that there are not nearly enough doctors or nurses to do the work the government and the public wants,”, Hunt said.