The Care Inspectorate and the Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC) have today published new figures on the levels of staff vacancies in Scotland’s social care services.

As with the previous report, this report provides a national overview of vacancies and recruitment difficulties reported by care services to the Care Inspectorate, the body which registers and inspects all social care services. It also introduces for the first time data on the actual number of vacancies services have, held by the SSSC, the social service workforce regulator.

In the past year, 38% of services reported having vacancies. This was an increase of 2% points on the previous year, (36%).

Care at home services (62%), care homes for older people (59%), housing support services (59%) and care homes for adults (53%) were the main service types with the largest proportion of services reporting vacancies all significantly above the national average.

Daycare of children services (23%) was the only main service type where the vacancy rates were significantly below the national average.

At 31 December 2017, the rate of whole time equivalent (WTE) vacancies for all services in Scotland was 5.9% up from 5.5% in 2016. This was higher than the overall vacancy rate across all establishments in Scotland of 3.1%.

The information in today’s report on vacancies, problems filling vacancies and the reasons why services have reported having problems filling vacancies, has been extracted from information provided by care services, across early learning and childcare, children’s services and adult social care.

Every care service is asked to complete an annual return each year to provide statistical and other information. The vacancy questions are asked for every care service type apart from childminders, who are typically sole providers.

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