Beyond Applause? Improving Working Conditions in Long-Term Care

OECD

Beyond Applause? Improving Working Conditions in Long-Term Care

Executive summary

The COVID-19 pandemic put a huge strain on the health and care systems, and it was thanks to the strenuous work and commitment of care workers that many lives were saved and people in need got support. We regularly applauded them from our windows, but a few years later we seem to have forgotten about them. Working conditions in long-term care (LTC) generally remain poor and it is difficult to attract and retain LTC workers. The situation is particularly dire for personal care workers who make up about four-fifths of them in the OECD, the other fifth consisting of nurses. This challenge will grow tremendously with ageing prospects. We need to go Beyond Applause and this requires taking significant measures to improve wages and working conditions more generally in order to ensure that people requiring assistance in their daily lives receive the care they need. This report describes what these measures should be.

https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/socia...king-conditions-in-long-term-care_9043e29e-en

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Document has implications for 'care' in general especially levels of pay, recruitment and levels of provision e.g:

Figure 2.15.

Wages of personal care workers kept pace with the average wage over the past decade
Wages of personal care workers in residential and non-residential care sectors as percentage of the average wage in 2010 and 2018