This week the new health and care secretary Yvette Cooper put out a statement calling on people to take care and look out for elderly and vulnerable friends, relatives and neighbours as we headed into our fifth heat wave of the year, with the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) issuing an amber heat health alert covering the whole of England.
However, despite having stood alongside the new prime minister Andy Burnham in a care home in London a couple of weeks ago to agree that it “we can’t keep walking around in the same circles” on social care reform and that it must be a priority for reform, Ms Cooper seems to have forgotten the care workforce in her comments on heat.
After a reminder about taking care of ourselves and others she said: "I want to thank NHS staff who are once again stepping up to cope with the extra pressures that hot weather brings.”
No one would dispute that the NHS workforce is at the sharp end of having no choice but to soldier on in often highly physical and warm, under-ventilated environments to look after people and should receive thanks.
But the care workforce are in exactly the same boat. And it’s this sidelining that is a big factor in holding back the sector, as Mr Burnham himself pointed out during the same care home appearance just two weeks ago.
I’m sure Ms Cooper didn’t mean to forget to express gratitude to hundreds of thousands of carers up and down the country who will be toiling in intolerable heat today, alongside their nurse colleagues (who at least got some prominence for their struggles in the extreme heat in the media today thanks to their union the RCN).
And of course sector leaders have welcomed the big changes the government is proposing to make set to dramatically improve care staff pay and conditions.
But words matter, as we learned during the pandemic when it was made explicit that we were saying thank you to all carers when applauding on our doorsteps during the Covid pandemic in 2020, not ‘just’ NHS staff.
If we really want to see lasting change that creates a properly funded and supported National Care Service, as our new leaders have said they do, we need to see a shift in societal behaviours and habits, and that starts at the top. As the prime minister acknowledged when he called on people to work together on reforms, big policy changes won’t work unless we see a shift in attitudes to ensure voters back reforms. A few years ago, an approach labelled nudge theory was having a moment in health circles, and even led to the creation of a “nudge unit” at No10 under David Cameron’s coalition government, designed to apply behavioural change insights to inform public service reforms.
While it appears the impact of this approach has not quite reached the heights of original expectations, it did produce evidence that choice of language matters. Which, to be honest, anyone working in journalism or PR could attest to.
So, next time we have an extreme situation impacting the workforce, we need the health and care secretary to thank frontline carers as well as their NHS peers. Without that simple shift in language and behaviour, they are likely to remain hidden, unsupported and sidelined by the wider public – and we’ll be off round that circle again.
