Adult day care workforce in England

This issue examines the contribution and the profile of the adult day care workforce in comparison to other adult social care workforces; mainly from residential and domiciliary care settings. The purpose is to provide intelligence about this particular workforce within the context of widespread closures of day care centres and the personalisation agenda. Descriptive and multinomial modelling analyses, using 71,861 individual workers' records, established that the profile of adult day care workers is significantly different from those working in either residential or domiciliary care settings. Judging by the information provided by employers through the NMDS-SC, adult day care workers are relatively older, less ethnically diverse and are more likely to be men than the other two workforces. They appear to hold relatively higher qualification levels and to contain larger proportions of managers and supervisors than the other two settings. Adult day care workers travel considerably shorter distances to work than domiciliary workers but longer distances than residential workers. The adult day care workforce also appears to be more stable, with a significantly larger proportion of workers on full-time and permanent contracts. There is significantly less reliance on agency or temporary workers in day services compared to the residential and domiciliary care sectors.