Member Article

Recruiting a quality care workforce

It has never been more of a challenge for care organisations to be confident they have complete visibility and control over their entire workforce than it is today. Care is essentially a service industry and as a company that manages temporary workforces on behalf of health and care organisations, for de Poel Clarity and our clients the individual experience of the patient is paramount. There are two factors that contribute to this experience: one is the clinical expertise of the carer and the second is how the carer is recruited and managed to work within a team of individuals.

Carers are part of a large team of people and efficient management enables the delivery of quality care, but looking back over the more recent care sector scandals to make the headlines, more often than not it has been workforce mismanagement that is most likely to blame. Problems of staff culture and not responding to customer needs are systemic to the internal management of carers and how they are recruited, not merely the responsibility of the carers at the point of delivery. Staffing pressures are part and parcel of managing a productive workforce, whether permanent or temporary, and without robust systems and processes that anticipate these pressures the quality of care will inevitably suffer.

New technologies have a role to play in how we manage a workforce that is in constant and in increasing demand because it’s the management of information that helps organisations to reduce those hidden administration costs of hiring temporary staff and forecast spending. Transparency, visibility and compliance are the pillars of good management, yet when we think of quality care we’re always inclined to think only of the frontline service. The quality of care services and health support is constantly brought into question, and the cost of public workforces in this environment is under particular scrutiny. However, the ability to help organisations in these sectors find new ways to optimise the recruitment and management process, without compromising quality of service is a rare thing. Now, more than ever, management is about implementing the best technology to ensure the quality of care is consistent, measured and can always be improved.

Across the UK, traditional work models are becoming a thing of the past. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the care sector where the right skills need to match needs of the patient with precision and discretion – yet these needs can change quite rapidly. We’re working with health and care trusts to create pools of talented workers, accurately assign them relevant work, and rate their performance through peer review – all from one system. It means that the NHS and private health and care companies can now rely on a single organisation to reduce complexity and cut costs by optimising every aspect of finding and managing their entire workforce from start to finish.

New, more strategic approaches to managing temporary labour, which view the contingent workforce as a strategic opportunity, and match each worker to a specific service need based on their individual skills and experience, are far better aligned to the way health and care services will be delivered now and in the future. By understanding how the care sector is changing and using more responsive and robust technology we can manage how care is delivered and ultimately promote continuous quality improvement across the care sector.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Andrew Preston, MD at de Poel Clarity .