A former care home boss and professor at Northumbria University has warned healthcare staff - in social care in particular - are leaving the profession to work in supermarkets due to the low pay and high responsibility they deal with on a daily basis.
Dr Benjamin Ajibade - an assistant professor at the university - was speaking at a "Newcastle Debate" hosted by Newcastle University and on the topic of "the future of the NHS. He said he had personally seen health and care staff leave the sector for supermarket jobs, and warned there was a need to work much harder to retain vital workers amid a workforce crisis
Dr Ajibade is a a registered Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) teacher, and senior lecturer in nursing. He said: "I know many people are leaving the professions. And what are we doing to retain those with experience and expertise?
"We might be bringing more staff into health and care but we are losing, I think, a little bit more than that we are bringing in. We must think about what can we do to encourage people to, rather than decide they will leave, stay in their job for say the next five years?
"I know many nurses who have resigned and gone off to Tesco to stack the shelves. That's a job with less responsibility and they get £12 an hour. They don't get as much working in healthcare."
At the debate, Cruddas Park GP Dr Guy Pilkington - who has a role leading illness prevention at the North East and North Cumbria Integrated Care System - also highlighted how the care workforce was "undervalued and underpaid". He said: "I think one of things we need to do is ensure we value the care workforce. They are very much undervalued. People can be working on minimal wages.
"I was still working pretty much full time as a GP during the pandemic and there's a particular care home I have been visiting for twenty years. So I know how difficult it was for those care workers. They gave everything for their residents and they saw some of those people die in awful conditions at the time before we really had any treatments [for Covid].
"They are underpaid, undervalued and until we recognised that it's going to be difficult to build the workforce."
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