Vadean, Florin;
Saloniki, Eirini-Christina;
(2023)
Job Quality and Job Separation of Direct Care Workers in England.
Innovation in Aging
, 7
(2)
, Article igad009. 10.1093/geroni/igad009.
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Abstract
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Most job leavers in the long-term care (LTC) sector in England do not leave the sector, but rather move to other LTC employers. Nevertheless, the high "churn" can have a negative impact on continuity and quality of care, care providers' recruitment and training costs, and the remaining staff workload and motivation. This study aimed to provide quantitative evidence on the drivers of direct care workers' job separation in England, with a focus on job quality. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: We used yearly data (2016-19) from the Adult Social Care Workforce Data Set, the leading source of LTC workforce data in England, including information on both LTC workers and employers. The analysis considered panel data econometric methods that accounted for unobserved heterogeneity at worker and employer levels. RESULTS: After controlling for observed individual, organizational, and local market characteristics as well as unobserved worker and employer heterogeneity, we found that everything else being equal, wages and employment conditions (i.e., full-time contracts and contracts with guaranteed working hours) significantly reduce job separation. For example, a 10% wage increase from the sample mean would reduce the job separation rate by about 3 percentage points. This wage effect was more than halved (i.e., downward biased) when not accounting for unobserved effects. DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS: The persistent high staff turnover in LTC in England highlights the need for finding practical solutions faced by care providers and policy-makers. Our findings showed that improving pay and employment conditions can be the way forward while methodologically stressing the importance of accounting for unobserved variable bias.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Job Quality and Job Separation of Direct Care Workers in England |
| Location: | England |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1093/geroni/igad009 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igad009 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| Keywords: | Long-term care, Panel data, Staff turnover, Workforce |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > Institute of Epidemiology and Health UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > Institute of Epidemiology and Health > Applied Health Research |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10167487 |
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