One estimate puts the number of care workers affected by the ‘no jab, no job’ policy at 38,000. There’s no getting around the fact that this is already resulting in care providers being unable to deliver many care packages.
Handing back contracts has been a more or less routine feature of adult social care for the last few years as providers have struggled to fill vacancies. Even before Brexit there were over 100,000 unfilled care worker roles.
Any care package that is handed back has to be re-brokered – essentially the process goes back to the beginning. And the impact of the Government’s vaccine mandate comes on top of the need to free up hospital beds by discharging people into the care system more efficiently.
The most pressing question is how much can care brokerage systems take before they break? We have to remember that the effects of ‘no jab, no job’ are not evenly distributed. In some inner city areas up to one in five care staff are unvaccinated.
A More Efficient Way to Transfer Care Packages?
There’s also a secondary question of whether there’s a more efficient way to transfer care packages from providers who can no longer fulfill them, to ones who can?
At the moment any care package a provider wants to hand back will probably be publicized to over-stretched care providers by email or phone. There’s a high probability that it will be filled through spot contracting at a relatively high rate.
Whatever the ultimate destination for the care package the process creates a lot of administrative work and probably many phone calls and emails. How many care brokerage teams have the capacity to deal with this volume of activity?
A better alternative is offered by eBrokerage from UDMS. This provides a secure, cloud-based online marketplace where care providers can exchange care packages under the supervision of the care brokerage team. The platform cuts out all of the emails, phone calls, spreadsheets and other activities that consume time you don’t really have.
Streamlining the process also helps to ensure that more packages are filled through approved priority care providers and fewer through spot contracts.
The eBrokerage by UDMS cloud-based platform can be implemented within a few weeks and is easy to procure through the G-Cloud 12 framework, via Ulysses eBrokerage Cloud Software.