A Health and Wellbeing Framework for the Social Care Workforce

Descriptions

Social Care Wales is looking to develop and introduce two aspects of what will eventually become an overarching health and wellbeing framework. They are as follows:- A Staff Governance Framework across social care, setting clear and measurable standards to help drive improvement. The staff governance framework will outline the expectations of employers and employees in the employment relationship including support for health and wellbeing.- Scope the guiding principles to an approach to workforce engagement and undertake a pilot of that approach.These two initiatives will provide some of the building block that will inform our ambition to develop a workforce health and wellbeing framework ensuring health and wellbeing is built into the long-term infrastructure of the sector and its workforce.This will build upon the proposals within the draft health and social care workforce strategy developed by Social Care Wales and Health Education Improvement Wales.The draft health and social care workforce strategy identified that valuing the workforce, particularly the health and wellbeing of the workforce, was critical if we are to create a sustainable workforce capable of delivering care and support services.The Covid-19 pandemic has clearly created a demand for the social care workforce looking to access support for their health and wellbeing, both in terms of self-help resources and anticipation that there will be a need to offer services capable of providing specialised and more intensive well-being support. Our current Health and Well-being website pages (on the Covid-19 site) has been the most visited from March 2020 – July 2020 and have been generated as a response to provide a range of support being provided to health colleagues, but not necessarily extended to the social care sector. This notion of parity was referenced clearly within the consultation on the health and social care workforce strategy.For further information and details of the work, please download the specification.