A couple of weeks ago I was in conversation with one of the team responsible for my care and treatment. Apart from having not quite got used to hearing them talk about how they were discussing me in the multidisciplinary team meeting that morning (there’s another blog there) I was surprised but also not surprised when the conversation turned to poverty amongst members of their team.
Poverty under any circumstances should not be acceptable in one of the richest countries in the world. Poverty amongst social care and health workers and the wider public sector workforce (including people whose wages depend on a public sector contract) is outrageous.
What rarely gets talked about is how poverty amongst social care and health workers impacts on their ability to provide good quality care, support and treatment for their patients and for those who draw on care and support.
If people are going to work unwashed, hungry and tired because they can’t afford to eat regularly or heat the water to have a shower or a bath. If they are focused on making sure that their kids have had one decent meal that day and they are feeling weak because they haven’t eaten anything for hours, how could it not impact on your care?
It could be that a consequence of them not being able to have a shower that morning might be that they bring an infection into work with them that they wouldn’t have brought in if they had been able to maintain their personal hygiene standards. Thus running the risk of infecting the people they are caring for.
Coming to work hungry is likely to make people much less productive and safe. They will find it much harder to do physical tasks or to concentrate on ensuring that they have given people their medications correctly, helped them with moving and handling in a dignified and safe way and made accurate records about how they have supported, cared or treated somebody. They may miss signs that the person they are caring for needs additional treatment or support because they’re not able to think straight and are so distracted by their hunger and money worries.
I recently heard about an NHS trust celebrating the fact that they had set up a food bank for their staff. In my mind that’s not something to be celebrated.
I also heard about an NHS scheme that enables NHS workers to purchase white goods at a discounted rate and allows them to pay for those goods in instalments. However, some NHS organisations have not made this scheme accessible to their lower paid workers because senior leaders don’t believe that those staff can afford the repayments. Isn’t it a complete oxymoron that those who are likely to need help the most are excluded from a scheme set up to help staff that are in need?
Poverty amongst social care and health workers and anyone whose salary is dependent on public sector funding is completely and utterly unacceptable. There is no rational argument for why it’s okay to treat essential workers as if they were a commodity to be sacrificed in the pursuit of economic growth.
It’s easy to brush off better pay as an unrealistic demand, but poverty amongst publicly funded social care and health staff and the impact poverty has on care, support and treatment… that’s harder to hide.
It is rarely acknowledged that well-paid publicly funded workers, who live and work in the communities that they are a part of, continually reinvest the money they earn back into the local economy by supporting local businesses. This doesn’t appear to be something that the increasing number of millionaires and billionaires in our society are doing in any meaningful way.
What is the point in a vision for social care or a review of social care or a ten year plan for the NHS workforce if both workers and the people they support are scrabbling around in order to survive? That’s not care or support or treatment. That’s neglect dressed up as policy.
Jim Thomas
May 2025
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