Health and social care

The health and social care services sectors employ approximately 3.25 million people in Great Britain. Both sectors are rapidly growing with forecasts of an additional 1 million workers needed in the social care sector alone by 2025.

The health care sector is dominated by the NHS employing around 1.4 million workers. The NHS and private healthcare organisations employ migrant workers, directly or through agencies, in a diverse range of occupations including nursing and auxilliaries, ancilliary and facilities staff and a proportion of highly skilled, highly paid medical practitioners such as dentists, surgeons and other doctors.

The social care services sector includes public, private, partnership and voluntary organisations and is dominated by micro and small employers providing domicilliary care, residential and nursing care homes. The majority of the workforce are employed in community and domicilliary care services.

The health and social care sectors have faced staffing shortages resulting from factors such rapid growth in demand for services and an ageing workforce and reduction in employment retention rates. Recruitment from overseas has been a key strategy in the NHS and in recent years overseas sources have contributed about 45 per cent of the new entrants registered with the Nursing and Midwifery Council.

An estimated 5.1 million days were lost to work-related ill health or injury within the health and social care services sectors in 2007/08. The main causes of injury and ill health are work related stress, manual handling and musculoskeletal disorders, slips and trips, dermtatitis and violence.

In addition to the duty to ensure that risks to migrant workers are being managed, health and social care providers must also take steps to ensure that the safety of patients and service users is protected; for example by ensuring competence in new and unfamiliar equipment and procedures; that work instructions and different clinical practices are understood; and that there is effective communication between staff and patients/service users.