Care workers who love their jobs are being priced out of the sector as pay fails to meet rising inflation, says UNISON.
The union, which represents thousands of care workers in Wales, has seen a flight of staff since the pandemic.
UNISON Cymru/Wales care lead Mark Turner (pictured above) spoke to BBC Radio Wales today (Friday July 14) and said: “What our members who work in care say is that they love the job, they are extremely committed to the job but they have been priced out.
“Pay and conditions just haven’t met the rise in inflation, and they were pretty rock bottom beforehand.
“In those circumstances it is extremely difficult to retain people working in the sector.
“We hear all the time about care workers that are doing extra shifts to just try and keep care homes running and that’s the same for home care.
“For those who are working in the sector it’s a really hard time.”
Mark also said care workers still haven’t got over the trauma of what they went through with the pandemic and added: “It is very difficult to recruit into the sector and one of the worrying things is that Welsh Government has projected that by 2030 we are going to need another 20,000 care workers in Wales which, at the moment, when we are struggling to fill vacancies we’ve got, is hard to see how that can be achieved unless there is radical change.”
Wales also has the most private sector delivery of care in all of the devolved nations.
64% of adult care is delivered directly by the private sector which leaves the system as a whole at the mercy of external events such as the cost of living crisis and the pandemic.
Mark said: “There is very little direct public provision of care now with most care delivered by the private sector for profit.
“UNISON takes the view that this experiment with private, for profit, delivery which has been in Wales for the last 20 years has clearly failed.
“For us, the answer is to re-balance the sector and for the projected national care service to be mainly publicly delivered directly through local authorities.”
