NORTH YORKSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL

17 November 2021

STATEMENT OF COUNTY COUNCILLOR MICHAEL HARRISON

Care Market pressures and remedial action

• Since July we have experienced a step-change in the North Yorkshire care market, with a 70% drop in applications for jobs in social care across the 500 providers, including NYCC.  This reflects a national picture and fierce competition within the labour market alongside hospitality, retail, heavy goods transport/logistics and construction.  Pressures are building within nursing, residential home and domiciliary care capacity as a result of workforce pressures within the external market, and we continue to see provider failures in the system.

· Packages of care are being handed back to the Council to either re-source or find alternative solutions to keep people safe. This is putting significant pressure on and impacting our in-house provision as we try to find solutions for people or fill the gaps using staff from our services.  This is impacting our ability to provide reablement and respite services.  Complex care packages are being handed back at short notice alongside those requiring two carers or in more rural locations. In addition we are seeing care home providers withdraw from providing nursing care or withdraw completely from the market.

· We are actively working with providers to support quality and sustainability as we navigate through these staffing shortages. We are about to launch a huge recruitment campaign with a focus on the career opportunities and diversity of a career in care. We are working with providers and partners to look at options and ideas to work more efficiently and promote people’s safety should we not manage to recruit more people to the sector.

• A system plan is in place with short, medium and long term actions to address issues relating to workforce, which includes capacity for registered manager support to care homes, recruitment to reablement, and recruitment to NHS posts to ensure sufficient intermediate capacity is available to meet the growing demand.

Social Care Reform

· The governments recent commitments published in September 2021 “Build Back Better – Our Plan for the NHS and Social Care” aims to introduce caps on care costs and makes changes to the thresholds for means-tested contributions.  In advance of this announcement on reforming adult social care we had two asks:

1. To address unpredictable care cost for individuals and families

2. To reform, stabilise and invest in the care market, so that people/councils actually have something to buy with their money and some choice.

· Whilst I welcome the announcement, and recognise that it is a serious attempt to reform the system, in practice it only addresses the first ask.  I await proposals to address the second ask.

Care Settings

· We are still seeing outbreaks of Covid-19 in care settings with care homes being impacted more than domiciliary care providers.  Around a quarter of care homes have outbreaks or infections amongst residents or staff.  This is despite vaccination rates being high.

· We have provided a response to the mandatory vaccine consultation that ended in October to support the mandatory roll out of the C-19 vaccine across all of health and social care, for the duration of this pandemic. We did not support a proposal to mandate the flu vaccine across health and social care.

Planning ahead for Winter

• NYCC have submitted their winter plan as part of the NHS planning submission, with staffing, on call arrangements, surge and business continuity plans refreshed for the winter period.
• We have established a permanent countywide Continuing Healthcare Team to ensure timely decisions can be made post hospital discharge, and have agreed a winter beds position with CCG partners to support flow out of hospital.
• We continue to deliver an enhanced 7 day service, including staffing capacity available across Bank Holidays

Integration with the NHS

· Work continues to move the two Integrated Care Systems (Humber Coast & Vale for most of North Yorkshire and West Yorkshire for Craven) onto a statutory footing from April 2022.

· Announcements of the appointments to the positions of Chair and Chief Executive for the two ICSs should have been made by the time of the council meeting, and I have been asked to work up proposals on how the Integrated Care Partnership for Humber Coast & Vale should operate.  

COUNTY COUNCILLOR MICHAEL HARRISON