Recruiting appropriate care workers to match your needs has always been a headache for service providers. COVID-19, however, has created a whole new range of issues when it comes to finding care workers with the right level of experience and skills.
Here’s some of the stories we’ve heard from service providers recently:
“Once we went down into lockdown it became twice as hard to find care assistants. Many of them were scared of catching COVID and preferred to work on hospital wards, which they saw as a more controlled environment. Many of them haven’t come back into the care sector, and I doubt they will now.”
“The lack of testing early on meant that care workers were watching every symptom they had. And so they should! But it meant that someone you were depending on could suddenly ring in to say that they were self isolating, and agencies were often unable to replace them at short notice.”
“I’ve needed an army of assistants in my care home to manage the cleaning regime, day-in, day out, and keep my residents calm and occupied throughout lockdown. If people don’t get proper breaks they just burn out, so you need to know that you can schedule in guaranteed down time for care workers.”
Flexible, Tailored Care is Key
What all of us working in the care sector over the past few months have learnt is that effective care is now all about flexibility and adaptation. As new information appears we change our practices in order to keep service users safe, and we shape our workforce to support those changes. Care home managers have said that the only way to cope, day-to-day over the COVID crisis was to be hands-on and working collaboratively with employees at all times. Anything less introduced unwanted risks.
How Swarme Can Help With Recruitment During COVID
It seems pretty clear now that the winter will introduce new COVID-related stresses into the UK’s care sector. It’s also clear that the onus is on everyone working in the sector to find ways to manage those stresses, minimise risks, and maintain high quality care for service users. It’s a tough ask, but those of us who have worked for decades in care are used to be asked to work miracles! Swarme isn’t the solution to the ongoing recruitment issues experienced in the care sector. But it has been created as the result of many years grappling with those issues. Swarme has been designed to offer total flexibility to recruiters and care workers. All you need is a phone or laptop to access our online platform. Once you’ve completed a super simple registration, you can:
- Find care workers available in your area
- View care worker profiles for skills, experience, values
- Read reviews of care workers
- Contact them directly
- Leave a review, and book people in advance for future work
Why Swarme?
The developers of Swarme have worked in the care sector for over 3 decades, and have direct experience of how recruitment has worked up until now. Swarme is a new approach to care recruitment which removes some of the barriers that have hampered flexibility to date. Our aim is to empower recruiters to be able to be more hands on, and so achieve better outcomes.
Would you like to find out more about Swarme? Either take a look at our website and sign up, or give us a ring today on 0782 577 4700
