Improved well-being for the social care and early years workforce

The well-being of the workforce is a focus of our work. We want the workforce to be happy, healthy and supported, so they in turn support the well-being of the people in their care.

We heard from more than 1,000 people working in social care who told us that the health and well-being of the workforce was of the most importance and it’s a focus of the workforce strategy for health and social care.

The year 2023 to 2024 was our third year realising the workforce strategy and it continued to be a challenging period for the sector. Despite the significant challenges of the last three years, we made progress and also started thinking about the next phase of the strategy’s implementation.

We asked you for feedback about our workforce delivery plan for 2024 to 2027 and nearly 80 people and organisations responded. We’ll be publishing the plan in 2024 to 2025.

In 2023 to 2024, we also updated our three plans to support the realisation of the workforce strategy:

• social work workforce plan

• direct care workforce plan

• strategic mental health workforce plan.

Since updating our health and well-being resources in July nearly 3,300 people have looked at the information on our website. By the end of March, our well-being email network had 91 members and our online well-being community had 56 active members.

We published a series of videos to support people who are involved in fitness to practise investigations. We also launched a well-being support service for them – 76 counselling sessions took place as part of the pilot.

We held our first health and well-being conference in October 2023 and 87 people attended . Those who attended told us they felt the conference gave them a chance to:

• connect with others working in social care, early years and childcare 

• share tips and ideas 

• find out more about the health and well-being tools and support that’s available, including our health and well-being framework. 

We held seven well-being sessions in 2023 to 2024, which were attended by 197 care workers. These sessions covered topics, such as:

• financial well-being

• support for unpaid carers who work

• supporting neurodivergent staff

• feeling valued and supported in early years and childcare.

We also held training sessions about psychological safety and compassion practices, which were attended by 45 managers. And we presented at 24 forums, conferences and events to raise awareness of workplace well-being and the support that’s available.  

In 2023 to 2024, 197 employers from 102 different organisations attended events we held as part of our new employer support service, which aims to offer a wide range of services, support and resources. We’ve created and pulled together for employers to help them in their role. We also met with 464 people at other related events to promote the service.

We published an evidence summary on the importance of well-being both for its own sake and because improved well-being can lead to higher retention rates. Our summary presents evidence on how employers in social care can support employee well-being and improve retention rates.