Residential Care during the coronavirus pandemic

Towards the end of 2021, the Royal Borough of Kingston (RBK) Quality Assurance Team ran a wellbeing survey for care workers, in response to concerns about the treatment for frontline staff in the care sector. Following the survey, RBK contracted Healthwatch Kingston to provide a retrospective engagement exercise with care workers about their wellbeing in the workplace during 2021-22, and to report anonymised findings to RBK.

Healthwatch Kingston co-produced a survey with care workforce managers, paid carers, and other staff. Healthwatch Kingston also held engagement sessions within care homes and during community events during 2022, as well as hosting a series of eight monthly one-hour online drop-in sessions for care workers between August 2022 and March 2023. In total the views of 102 care workers were gathered.

Healthwatch Kingston found that most care workers valued their work, gained satisfaction from it and felt both their physical and mental health was taken seriously by their employer. However, there were also many stressors, such as being short stagged and feeling bereaved when a patient dies.

Carers generally felt respected, but over a third had witnessed disrespect and/or discrimination and a fifth did not feel confident in reporting it or felt that clients who were disrespectful were unwell and not fully aware of their own behaviour.

One third felt that the workload had become unmanageable in the previous year, and 48% had other unpaid caring responsibilities as well. They felt stressed by low pay, exacerbated by the increase in the cost of living. But there was a feeling that ‘nothing will change’, given the well-recognised issues of underfunding in the care system.