by Richard Whitehouse, local democracy reporter

The Cornwall councillor responsible for social care says that care workers should be paid more to help ensure there are enough people available to provide care. Cllr Andy Virr said that whilst Cornwall Council was one of the first councils to pay care workers the Living Wage, he believed they should have a pay rise to help tackle the cost of living crisis.

With Cornwall still having issues with people being unable to be discharged from hospital as there are insufficient care resources around which have led to ambulances queuing up at Royal Cornwall Hospital, the need for more care staff has been frequently been raised.

One area Dr Virr, Cabinet member for adult social care, said was a particular issue was in the recruitment and retention of care staff, a problem across the country but particularly seen in Cornwall due to low rates of pay and the increase in costs of housing and living.

“We have an issue in getting enough resources at the moment. That does impact our ability to meet the needs out there and that is a bit of a worry. We are working very hard to recruit people.

“But we have people who previously worked in care going to work in hospitality in the summer and supermarkets in the winter – but we are trying to get those people to come back and for more people to enter the care sector as a career.

“We were one of the first councils to pay the Living Wage for carers and we are hoping that more people will come forward to work in care.”

Dr Virr said that it was difficult to get agency staff from outside of Cornwall to work here due to the high costs of housing and said that there was work being done across the health and social care sectors to see whether modular housing could be provided for staff.

However, he admitted that there were still ways to improve: “There is always a need for more money, particularly in the rates of pay that we offer our care workers. We are seeing rising inflation and I would like to see the pay offer for care staff to go up. It will have to come from the Government but the budget conversations in the council are currently underway as well and this department will have to deliver savings. We want those savings to be doing things differently and, I hope, better.”

However, Cllr Virr said that attracting more care staff to work in Cornwall was not the only way to address current issues and said that there also needed to be a shift in how care is provided. He said that the council was aiming to get people able to rehabilitate and recuperate in their own homes, rather than going into residential care.

He said: “We have an over-reliance on bedded care. Often what is not seen is that someone has an illness or injury and we need to give them a chance of rehabilitation.

“We need to be more careful about how we assess people’s needs so that we get them the right care in the right place. Sometimes they can end up being more dependent than they actually need to be. We want to invest in this model approach of rehabilitation. We are trying to get the model right so that everybody has the opportunity for rehabilitation so they can, ideally, get back into their own homes.

“Too often people are placed in care home beds inappropriately and end up stuck where they shouldn’t be and it exhausts resources as well. It uses up resources that might not be needed.

“For those people who are able to have that rehabilitation stage at home we will send them home with a rehabilitation care package – we are not sending people home without care.

“You could argue that our system is too risk averse, there is never no risk, people can get confused or there can be a risk of falls, but there is a misunderstanding in the public about what we are trying to do.

“A bed in a care home is not always the safest place, and we should not be admitting people into care homes unless they absolutely need one. If you get the risk imbalance wrong you end up with people stuck in beds for a long time.”