Health and social care: winter preparedness plan 2024 to 2025

Priority Four

Priority Four: Focus on supporting the wellbeing of our health and social care workforce, their capacity and improving retention, as well as valuing and supporting Scotland's unpaid carers.

Our highly skilled and committed workforce is the cornerstone of our response every winter. We understand the continued pressures that our health and social care workforce, including volunteers and unpaid carers, are performing under, now more than ever. In order to meet demand, we must continue to focus on supporting workforce capacity and retention of staff, unpaid carers, and our third sector partners, and ensuring that we support the wellbeing of staff through challenging periods of high demand. We are pursuing a range of different strategies to nurture the workforce in both health and social care over the long term. Within our health workforce, for example, this includes supporting the expansion of trainee doctor posts, to reflect the changing demands on our health and social care system. IMPACT have recently completed a literature review looking at what best supports wellbeing for personal assistants and their employers, this offers provide useful insight for future planning to support this key social care workforce.

The JSST was established to ensure that further meaningful progress can be made in partnership to address pressures, and with a focus on delivery of outcomes which relate to the adults', children's and the social work workforce. A key objective of the Taskforce is to identify collective and individual organisational actions required to address the challenges facing the professions through focusing on improvement opportunities across the workforce journey, and identifying where practical changes to practice, working across boundaries, can enable a step change in the delivery of integrated care and service delivery.

It is estimated that between 700,000 and 800,000 people provide unpaid care for a relative or friend at home and within other community or residential supports, and so we must also consider and respond to the wellbeing and support needs of Scotland's hugely valued unpaid carers, as well as enabling carers to participate in education, training or employment alongside their caring responsibilities, ensuing that carers are able to sustain their caring role with positive wellbeing. We must also continue to support the effective implementation of SDS for people who access support and their carers as the default approach to social care, ensuing people have choice and control over their care and support.

How we will jointly deliver this priority:

• Progressing workforce activity through the JSST, including development of paid college placement project which aims to develop and socialise a national paid college placement blueprint for adult social care employers such as Local Authorities, independent sector and third sector. It focuses on expanding successful practices to increase the availability of paid placements for adult social care students during their qualifications. The blueprint is currently being developed and will be implemented in future college academic sessions from 2025.
• Through Scottish Government funding to NES, fund the CWSS which supports Adult Social Care Organisations in Scotland in their efforts to recruit internationally by establishing network platforms for sharing best practice, networking and discussion within the social care sector.
• Scottish Government is committed to working with the sector to look at options to improve rates of pay and terms and conditions for the social care workforce and we are currently working with stakeholders to develop sectoral bargaining for the sector to advance this. However, public finances are under unprecedented pressure, and we must balance the fiscal position while the demand for government support and intervention continues to rise.
• Supporting any retiring staff who wish to continue in employment suitable to them and to the service through the Retire and Return provisions outlined the NHS Scotland Retirement Policy.
• Supporting staff throughout their career, to manage demands on their time and energies at home as well as at work. The national 'Supporting Work Life Balance' workforce policies to provide staff with a range of flexible working options to help them to balance their lifestyle whilst maintaining and promoting the best possible service to our patients and service users. These include a Flexible Work Location and Flexible Work Pattern Policy.
• Encouraging Boards to promote part-time work opportunities to their health, social care and social work students, who can help to build short-term capacity as required.
• Our NHS Scotland Flexible work location and NHS Scotland Flexible work pattern policies provide staff with a range of flexible working options to help balance their lifestyle whilst maintaining and promoting the best possible service to patients and service users.
• Provide essential wellbeing support to staff across health, social care and social work suffering poor mental health through:
  • Availability of confidential mental health care and treatment for registered staff through the Workforce Specialist Service, as well as psychological therapies and interventions for all staff, supporting staff to treat anxiety, depression and improve issues like difficulty sleeping
  • Additionally the National Wellbeing Hub continues to offer a range of self-service resources for staff^[15].
  • Further, NHS 24 deliver the National Wellbeing helpline, offering a 24/7 compassionate listening service.

These wellbeing provisions provide important intervention options for staff suffering poor mental health, improving the likelihood of these staff returning to, or remaining in work for the longer term, and improving the quality of care they are able to provide.

• Ensure people who provide unpaid care are supported in their caring roles and supported to look after their own health and wellbeing alongside engaging in education, training and/or employment. We are implementing our National Carers Strategy to drive forward long-term changes to improve the lives of unpaid carers across Scotland. It sets out a cross-government approach to carers issues, including through social care, social security policies and supporting carers in employment and education.
  • Supporting local carer centres and young carer services to build capacity and ensure all carers can access consistent and up-to-date information.
  • We will work with stakeholders to improve the availability and range of short breaks.
  • We will continue to work with local service commissioners, Shared Care Scotland and others to promote greater availability and choice of short break support in different areas.
• Continue to explore how volunteers can provide support in both discharge from hospital, in assisting people to attend appointments, and consider appropriate use of established local and national volunteer partnerships. We will also explore how the National Volunteering Hub can be best utilised to support the health and social care system to manage pressures over the winter period.