Meeting the Needs of the Social Care and Health Care Workforce: Can a Duck Sleep with a Hippopotamus?

Abstract

In a period when recruitment and retention are crucial issues in health and social care the focus of this paper is: • Who are the workforce of health and social care? • What are the needs of that workforce? • How safe is it for the much smaller partner, social care, to work together with the much larger health care? The latter point heads us back to the sub‐title of the paper: can a duck sleep with a hippopotamus? This question comes from an advert used in the UK for a bed manufacturer, where our British sensitivities and fear of sex prevents us from showing a man and a woman in a double bed, what the Spanish charmingly call a ‘cama de matrimonio’, a marriage bed, and instead we show a hippopotamus and a duck sleeping, safely, in the same bed. To follow this analogy, we have to show: • that health and social care are in the same bed; • that one is as large as a hippopotamus, and the other as small as a duck; • what the dangers are of this; and ask the question: • What is there in the place of ‘spring technology’ which would permit both to sleep together, and for the duck not to end up flat? In doing so, I hope to answer the first three questions I posed.