The European Centre and ICF Mutual Learning Services are organising a series of five workshops in Brussels about challenges and potential solutions in the area of long-term care (LTC) from an EU perspective.
The third workshop took place on 1 and 2 April 2019 and served to discuss the most pressing policy challenges around the LTC workforce. Kai Leichsenring wrote and presented the thematic background paper ‘Training, recruiting and retaining the long-term care workforce’.
The paper as well as the ensuing discussions during the workshop focused on the definition and description of the individual components of the ‘LTC workforce’ across Member States, including the often neglected group of care-givers, namely (unpaid) informal carers (family, friends and neighbours). Deteriorating working conditions, problems in recruiting and retaining staff, issues in training and skills development as well as a wide range of unsolved regulatory caveats regarding migration and the mobility of LTC workers were identified as key challenges. These critical themes became the starting points for the development of recommendations to improve education, training and working conditions as well as to support innovative initiatives that are able to ensure an appropriate level of the future LTC workforce both in quantitative and qualitative terms.
