Steps must be taken to address care workers shortage, says advisory group

Care workers working in the private sector should be paid a minimum of the national living wage (€12.90 per hour), a new report recommends.

Ireland is already facing a dearth of care workers, with 5,312 people waiting for home support from the Health Service Executive’s services for older people as of July this year because no care worker was available to provide them.

There was an average of 4.5 vacancies per nursing home last year and each year more than one in 10 nursing home workers either quit or retire.

The Report of the Strategic Workforce Advisory Group on Home Carers and Nursing Home Healthcare Assistants has warned that unless drastic steps are taken to address the labour shortages in care workers, the problem will get worse.

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A strategic advisory group was set up in March 2022 to examine workforce challenges in publicly and privately provided frontline carer roles in home support and nursing homes.

With Ireland having one of the most rapidly ageing populations in the European Union over the coming decade, demand for care services will double during the next 30 years.

The number of people over the age of 65 will increase from 629,800 to between 1.53 million and 1.6 million by 2051. At the same time, the population aged 80 and over is projected to increase from 147,800 in 2016 to between 535,900 and 549,000 by 2051.

The group said that paying the national living wage should be a “minimum baseline” and it ought to be up to employers to offer more attractive remuneration in order to attract and retain workers.

It has put forward a set of 16 recommendations to attract more people into the profession. It said steps must be taken to close the gap between pay and conditions for directly employed HSE care workers and those working in the private sector.

This could be partially achieved by ensuring that care workers in the private sector will receive payments for time spent travelling between service users’ homes and any “reasonable, vouched/certified travel expenses incurred”. Private sector care workers should also have the right to collective bargaining.

There should be a national campaign to raise the profile and promote training opportunities for a career as a healthcare assistant and home support worker including a rolling recruitment campaign.

Those on jobseeker’s allowance should be allowed to work five days a week, if it involves working just a few hours on those days. Currently they can only work for three days a week. This would improve recruitment.

A total of 1,000 work permits should be issued for non-EU/EEA citizens to work in Ireland on the basis of a minimum two-year contract, a minimum salary for home support workers of €27,000 a year based on a 39-hour week, and a minimum continuous shift length per working day of 4 hours.

Minister of State for Older People Mary Butler said she “fully supported” the group’s call for care providers to pay the national living wage at a minimum. She also supported the payment for the time spent travelling between service users’ homes and for reasonable travel expenses.