Policy Influencing the Employment of Care Home Workers – a Literature Review

Literature Review

Introduction

Care homes, also known as adult family homes, residential care or personal care homes offer personalized service to small groups of adults. These residential care homes provide food, meal service and assistant with personal care activities such as bathing, feeding and cleaning.

St Anne’s lodge is the one of residential care home, located in Surrey. This care home offer supervised care, meals, activities and health management. While assisted living communities may offer senior aerobics and field trips.

Care Assistant or care workers always guide their service users. There are specific skills may considerate in recruitment process in care home sector. Increasing numbers of people are employed as ‘support workers’ where their role is to help people with disabilities and join in with aspects of everyday life. Support worker act as a bridge between professionals and service users, enabling better communication.

Support worker is a person who employed on an individual basis to stand-in independence and provide assistance for a service user in areas of usual life such as communication, social involvement and who may take on secondary tasks in esteem encouragement, personal care and learning.

Effective recruitment and selection of a caring and skilled adult care workforce has a central role to play delivering high quality care and support to people who need it. The company challenge is to ensure the workforce has the right number of people with the right skills, knowledge and behaviours to deliver the quality and friendly care.

Implication of the care ACT 2014 requires significant change in care workers roles and practice to meet new legal expectations. The Act high lights a specific focus on local authorities, due to their new duties and statutory responsibilities. The main difference between residential and nursing homes is that residential homes do not have to have nurses on the staff, whereas nursing homes must employ qualified nurses and must be able to provide24 hour nursing care.

Some residential homes like st Anne’s lodge, which have real commitment and well trained staff, can care very well for people with learning disabilities. In general, residential homes look after people who are more mobile, active and alert. Residential homes will help them to washing, dressing and toileting and of course provide meals and activities. There will, however, be less nursing care than would be available in nursing homes.

Objective 1

Legislative and policy frame work that influence the selection and employment of individuals in Care homes

All care homes have to be registered with the care quality Commission. All nursing homes required to have a qualified nurse on duty at all times but apart from this there are no requirements for care homes to be owned by, or to employ, qualified staff. The home should have its own training programmes for new staff as well as all the staff. Staff might follow the Alzheimer’s society training path way. According to care quality Act staff in care homes should sensitive, tolerate and caring as well as efficient, hardworking and capable.

Deprivations of liberty Safeguard (DoLS) were brought in with the Mental Capacity Act 2005 to protect people being inappropriately deprived of their liberty. Key factors that may suggest deprivation of liberty include,

• Staff exercising complete and effective control over the care and movement of a person for a significant period
• Staff exercising control over assessment, treatment, contracts and residence.

The supreme Court has recently issued a ruling that anyone subject to continuous supervision in care home and lacking capacity should be referred for DOLS assessment. So when recruiting a staff in care homes care manager and Owner should consider about the legislations.

According to CIPD, when a company is doing recruiting and selection process they should fulfil the legislative requirements otherwise the individuals have authority to take legal actions against the company. So in recruitment and selection process there are many laws and regulations are needed to follow as a care home or a company.

The immigration, Asylum and nationality Act 2006

This provision came into on 29^th February 2008 an aim to prevent illegal immigrant working in UK. Citizen of the European Union (EU) and The European Economic Area are known as European nations and they do not need work permits, they have the right to come UK and look for work. Someone who is subject to immigration control must obtain a work permit before taking up employment in the UK.

The Asylum Immigration Act has been introduce discourage illegal working in the UK. This has made it a criminal offence (punishable by fine up to £10,000) of employing a person without immigration authorisation to work.

Data Protection Act 1998

The Act implies certain types of information that relevant to employees restricted to impose to other party. Especially data collections including in recruitment and selection process.

The Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006

This provides the legislative frame work to people who are working with children and vulnerable adults.

The Equality Act 2010

The equality Act came into force on 1^st October 2010. It aims to provide steadier and more effective legal frame work for avoiding discrimination

Objective 2

What are the approaches that may use in selection and recruitment process in care home sector?

Getting the recruitment process right is also vital to employers if they are to select best people for the job available or discriminatory practice can cost employers time and money in defending legal claims.

Recruitment and Selection Process

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=images+of+recruitment+and+selection+process+according+to+Acas

In the care comes, employers increasingly use internet and recruitment consultations for recruitment. Many still use old fashioned newspapers advertisements. Especially in the specialist trade press as well as putting advertisements in job centres. Naturally job advertisements specie the need for certain skills qualifications as well as requirements to submit an application form by a certain date. An employment advertisement is the law identifies every form of advertisement whether available on public or internally within the company, in a newspaper or other publication on TV , radio or an employee notice board. The use of gender specification words describing job in advertisement such as “Career”, “Care Assistant” or “support worker” avoid as an intention to discriminate.

Both the publisher and advertiser will be guilty of the unlawful act, although as a publisher you do have a possible defence if you can prove you relied on a from the advertiser that the advert was not unlawful and that it was reasonable for you to rely on that statement.

In the case of race discrimination, it is lawful if that race is either under represented among the workers doing that work in the locality targeted for recruitment. There is no formal legal requirement to advertise job vacancies internally. But there are risks associate with the manner of advertising. Restrictive methods of recruitment such as internal advertisements or recruitment by word of mouth may have opportunity to, for example a particular sex , religion or race. It may then be discriminatory.

If applicant thinks an advert is discriminatory, the applicant can contact the equal opportunities commission. The equality or the disability right commission is who have the power to take action in relation to advertisement.

Generally CV should give same sort of information about the candidates. The candidates should exaggerate their qualifications or current level of responsibilities. Candidate should take care to provide accurate and truthful information because in care sector candidates have to work with people with disabilities. Communication is an essential component of care sector. Supporting workers communicate with clients, relatives and health professionals in range of setting. Verbal and non-verbal communication is the means to understanding and assessing clients. Carers Should have a sense of humour and friendly nature because the benefits of humour and laughter have long been recognise and are mentioned in the Bible; Proverbs 17:22 states ‘A cheerful heart does good like medicine : but broken spirits make sick’. So careers need to have a power to make their clients happy. So lies on CV s and application foams can result in dismissal after candidates have been hired. That may impact on their future credibility in the job market.