Longitudinal Care Study (LoCS) Interim report to the Department of Health

The purpose of this project is to increase understanding of the factors that facilitate or constrain recruitment and retention in the social care workforce in England focussing on adult services in four sites. Since going 'live' in 2006 the National Minimum Data Set for Social Care (NMDS-SC) has been gaining momentum. The NMDS-SC is providing the sector with much needed information on the profile of the adult social care workforce in England (see Eborall et al 2010). While the NMDS-SC has a number of limitations, both in terms of width and depth of coverage, for example, with the over representation of the independent sector and because the returns are provided by employers rather than employees, we are now far better able to investigate several workforce characteristics that previously were only suspected as being such. At the time of designing the current study, the NMDS-SC was still at an early stage, therefore, one of the initial aims was to establish the demographic profile of the adult social care workforce. Currently, some of these gaps in knowledge have started to close through the greater availability and more sophisticated analysis of NMDS-SC data. In 2009, the Social Care Workforce Research Unit (SCWRU) launched the Social Care Workforce Periodical (SCWP), a regular online publication presenting in-depth analyses of different aspects of the adult social care workforce using the latest data from the NMDS-SC. So far (December 2010), seven issues have been produced examining vacancy and turnover rates, the personal profile of the workforce, the role of young workers in the sector, the characteristics of the adult day care workforce, the role of third age workers in the sector, job shifting and the dementia care workforce. The analyses presented in SCWP are conducted by researchers at SCWRU and have been peer reviewed unless otherwise stated.