April 2, 2024
On Thursday 21st March, our Operations Officer, Jamie Bloomfield, attended the UK Care Week, at the NEC Birmingham, on behalf of our members, to network with essential contacts and learn from fantastic speakers in the sector.
1) Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Care
The day began with Jamie witnessing Katie Thorn (Project Lead from the Digital Care Hub) seminar on ‘Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Care’.
The points discussed from Katie was how is AI used in care, including using chatbots that can:
- draft policies and procedures
- summarise meeting notes
- create activities for clients in care services.
- limit staff admin time through listening to someone speaking about something and creating a presentation from the information. This is useful when a care provider may attend a conference and/or training session and may want to relay the information to their team.
2) Panel Discussion- Technology for Workforce Wellbeing- help or hindrance?
Jamie then listened to a panel discussion with:
- Paula Cashmore (Founder of Achievable Care Quality Community)
- Lee Trueman (Commercial Director of Health Automated)
- Matthew Bond (CEO and Co-Founder of Borderless)
- Jack White (Founder of Health Automated)
- Marianne Mills (Director of 2M Training)
- limiting admin time, ensuring managers may not end up taking work home, due to the support of technology
- the use of online courses and digital systems can reduce the length and complexity of sheets of paper when training staff
- wellbeing can be supported through the use of apps that monitor staff’s wellbeing through a scoring system (can be anonymous) and can offer ideas of next steps if scores point to a concern, whether this be through company counselling services, or management support.
- Digital Social Care Records avoids mistakes through prompts and reminders and ensures staff are accountable for tasks
- Staff, service users and families may be hesitant to use technology and it is up to the manager to ensure there is suitable training and guidance around the benefits such as ‘the more information that is held in a persons care record, the better the standard of care will’
- People may be concerned that their data isn’t safe – managers must ensure they outline what policies and procedures are in place that ensures data processing is safe.
Keynote Speaker- Helen Whatley, Minister for Social Care- Current and Future Plans
- The DHSC has created a ‘Care Workforce Pathway’ to support the development of a professionalisation of the workforce, to enable higher rates of pay going forward, including the rise of the National Living Wage.
- There will be a training fund released later this year, specifically for Registered Managers.
- There will be a new fund released in the summer for Apprentices and Nursing in Social Care.
- The DHSC will be creating a new Digital Passport for training in social care, so employees can move to another care organisation and can take their training with them.
- The DHSC has released an Adult Social Care Technology Fund for the implementation of AI and resources such as ‘Robo Pets’ in care services.
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Published July 2025 (data correct as at 2024/25) Skills for Care have launched their annual report on the size and structure of ythe care workforce This provides the most up-to-date and comprehensive overview of the size and structure of the adult social care sector and workforce in England. A short, written report is available: download a copy of the report here. The methodology for this year’s report has changed from previous years. Adult social care related roles employed by the NHS are no longer included in the headline statistics for the size of the adult social care workforce. This change has been applied retrospectively to previous years, so the trends in this report are consistent. Comparing figures from this report to previous reports will not produce a valid trend. Also, our estimates for the number of filled posts in the independent sector now come from our automated data pipeline. This has resulted in substantial improvements to our estimates over time and some figures have changed as a result from previous versions of this report. For further information, see our statement. To download the data behind the visualisation below, including trended information, please see the Workforce estimates page.
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