Martine. I wouldn't disagree that long term we should be looking at a National Care Service to complement or, ideally, to be integrated with the NHS. However, that's a longer term fix. In the short term, as Jane says, there's no queue of people waiting to join care organisations. It's partly pay is too low and partly there aren't enough people looking for jobs. That's true from the high tech sector as well as hospitality, care services, NHS, etc. Of course, at the high tech end it can be solved by remote working where one can employ someone anywhere in the world for software development and systems support. However, care, health and hospitality are hands on activities and need people on site to deliver. Interestingly, I sat in on an IT recruitment session where those running data centre were complaining about the dearth of people applying for their jobs. They need people on site to plug in cables, and check, install and replace equipment but no young people are attracted to it even though salaries are probably reasonable; that's in part because many youngsters apparently don't realise that behind Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google, Amazon, etc there are huge warehouses of servers and discs underpinning all those services! (And if they do, it's not as attractive as, say, developing computer games ...)I'm sure robotics and AI will solve the data centre problems - and I believe Japan is investing in robots for care services? So perhaps there's a high-tech solution for care?
Michael Ixer ● 978d