The care sector faces a recruitment crisis. Here's what's being done.
The care sector faces a recruitment crisis. Here's what's being done.
If you've been trying to arrange care for a loved one recently, you may have already felt the pressure. Waiting lists are longer. Care packages take time to put together. Some providers are turning new enquiries away. Behind the scenes, the adult social care workforce is under more strain than at any point in living memory — and families across North East Derbyshire, Chesterfield, Bolsover and the wider region are feeling the effects.
It's a worrying time, but it isn't a hopeless one. Real changes are happening, and understanding what's going on can help families make better-informed decisions about the care they arrange.
The scale of the staffing shortage
According to Skills for Care, the body that tracks the social care workforce in England, there are around 131,000 vacant posts in adult social care on any given day — a vacancy rate roughly three times higher than the wider UK economy. Turnover sits at nearly 25%, meaning a quarter of the workforce changes each year. For domiciliary care in particular, the figures are even tougher: home care providers report some of the highest vacancy rates in the sector.
What does this mean in practical terms? It means a care worker who pops in to help your mum with her morning routine may be covering for a colleague who left last week. It means rotas are tighter, and continuity — that lovely familiarity of seeing the same friendly face — is harder to protect than it once was.
Why care workers are leaving
The reasons aren't a mystery, and they aren't really about the work itself. Most care workers we speak to genuinely love what they do. The challenges tend to be structural:
Pay. For many years, care work has been paid at or just above the National Living Wage, while the responsibilities have grown more complex. Supermarkets, hospitality and warehousing often offer comparable wages with fewer pressures.
Recognition. Despite carrying people through some of the hardest moments of their lives, care workers have historically been treated as a lower-skilled workforce. That perception is changing, but slowly.
Conditions. Travel time between visits, fragmented hours, and unpredictable rotas have made domiciliary care especially demanding.
What's being done at a national level
The good news is that the crisis has finally pushed social care up the political agenda. Several things are shifting.
The introduction of a national Care Workforce Pathway by the Department of Health and Social Care is creating, for the first time, a clear professional structure for care workers — with defined roles, expected skills, and progression routes. It's the beginning of social care being treated as a proper career, not a stop-gap job.
A Fair Pay Agreement for adult social care has also been proposed under recent legislation, with the aim of negotiating sector-wide minimum terms — covering pay, sick leave and training — rather than leaving each provider to set its own. This won't fix everything overnight, but it's the most significant structural change in decades.
Investment in training and qualifications through the Adult Social Care Learning and Development Support Scheme is helping providers fund Level 2 and Level 3 qualifications for their staff. For care workers, that means proper recognised credentials they can build a career around.
What good providers are doing locally
National policy matters, but day-to-day, the difference is made by individual providers choosing to do things differently. Across Chesterfield, Bolsover, Worksop and Mansfield, the providers who are weathering the crisis best tend to share a few habits.
They pay above the legal minimum wherever they can, and they pay for travel time between visits — which sounds obvious but isn't universal. They build smaller, geographically tight rounds so carers aren't driving across half of Derbyshire in a single shift. They invest in training beyond the statutory minimum, and they treat their staff as colleagues rather than shift fillers.
Most importantly, they protect continuity of care. Sending the same two or three carers to the same person, week after week, isn't just nicer — it's safer, more dignified, and easier on everyone involved.
What this means for families looking for care
If you're arranging domiciliary care for someone you love, the workforce crisis doesn't mean you have to settle. It does mean it's worth asking better questions before you commit to a provider.
A few worth keeping in your back pocket:
"How many different carers will be coming?" A good provider will aim for a small, consistent team — usually two or three regulars, with a known cover carer for holidays.
"What's your staff turnover like?" High turnover usually shows up in the quality of the visits. Providers who look after their staff tend to keep them.
"Do you pay carers for travel time?" A simple question that tells you a lot about how a provider treats its team.
"What training do your staff have beyond the basics?" Look for ongoing development, dementia awareness, end-of-life care, medication competency — not just the legal minimum induction.
You can also check the provider's most recent Care Quality Commission report, which is freely available online. It won't tell you everything, but it gives you an honest starting point.
The local picture
Here in North East Derbyshire and the surrounding towns, we're not immune to any of this — but we do have something working in our favour. Smaller, locally-rooted providers tend to know their carers personally, know the area inside out, and can build the kind of close-knit teams that bigger national chains struggle to. When you ring up about care for your dad in Clay Cross or your aunt in Shirebrook, you're more likely to speak to someone who actually knows the round.
That local connection isn't a marketing line. It's genuinely what makes good domiciliary care possible during a workforce crisis.
A gentle thought to finish on
The social care workforce crisis is real, but it isn't the whole story. Up and down the country — and right here in our corner of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire — there are thousands of care workers quietly doing extraordinary work, and providers fighting hard to look after them properly so they can keep doing it.
If you're starting to think about care for someone in your family, please don't feel rushed. Take your time, ask the questions above, and trust your instincts about who you'd want walking through your loved one's front door.
If you'd like a friendly, no-pressure conversation about what good domiciliary care looks like in this area, we're always happy to talk things through — even if you're only at the very beginning of working out what you need.