How can social care tackle its image problem?

The concept of ‘careship’ – a combination of care and leadership – could become the sector’s quality mark, by Simon Cotterrell

Social care has an image problem. There doesn’t seem to be a week that goes by without the unsavoury revelations of another hidden camera or the revelations of another whistleblowing care worker.

But ask the vast majority of the 1.8 million people that work in the care sector, cumulatively the country’s biggest employer, and you’ll get a much more positive response. So why does the sector find it such a struggle to, even if it’s just on the odd occasion, lift its head above the parapet?

Having only recently engaged with the care sector in our role as brand consultants to the National Skills Academy for Social Care, we have a few thoughts on how social care might begin to climb its way out of the doldrums.

Our first observation of the care sector came from looking at the photographs it uses to promote what it does. Whether it’s a prospectus for a care home, a training guide for care workers or a government policy document, there’s one striking consistency that is so expected of the sector that it goes totally unnoticed: wherever a care worker is photographed, they are hunched over in “care pose”. Care workers are always pictured at a lower level to service users.

Contrast this with how other professions are portrayed. Subtle as this may seem, this diminished status in the way care professionals are portrayed subliminally contributes to the diminished status with which the outside world considers the sector.

The second thing we noticed is that, unlike other sectors, the care sector has no one organisation or organising principle that you can point to as an identifiable provider of leadership.

The care sector is highly fragmented, with tens of thousands of private operators that deliver the service, a myriad of professional organisations that advise them, and a plethora of NGOs that contribute to thought leadership. Subsequently there are no signature names that the outside world can turn to as the recognised flag bearers for the sector, just as there’s no recognisable hypothesis on what makes good social care. This void not only creates a lack of leadership but a sense of enigma that all too quickly leads to suspicion.

Perhaps, though, the biggest contributor to the poor image of the care sector is the difficulty consumers have in buying the service.

If you’ve ever found yourself in the position where you have to move an elderly parent into a care home, you’ll have doubtless experienced how difficult it can be to make a choice. That’s partly because social care is a subject most of us aren’t used to assessing, and partly because there are no consistent criteria to enable a comparative assessment.

That’s what consumers need to make a buying decision. The ability to compare, based on both rational and emotional criteria, is the foundation stone of consumerism and yet the care sector, which sells a product every one of us will need to buy in some form at some point in our lives, is seemingly incapable of creating a means of consistent comparative evaluation.

At the heart of our positioning for the National Skills Academy for Social Care, an organisation charged with developing leadership in the care sector, is a simple philosophy: it’s how we care that counts. Care doesn’t go wrong because evil people do evil things, it goes wrong where unmotivated people don’t think beyond the checklist of tasks they’ve been handed.

Care is an occupation where the outcome is more dependent on how you go about the task than the delivery of the task itself. If the sector can get behind the notion that it’s the human factor, the ‘how’ care is delivered that’s important to people, it can create a simple stance on which to base a consistent argument: the basis of a better image.

Armed with this philosophy, we then set about creating a brand for the academy’s leadership training and advisory offer. The idea we came up with was “Careship” a fairly simplistic term that sees the bunging together of “care” and “leadership”. Ideas like Careship could not only be of benefit to the academy, but add another rung on the ladder that gets the care sector out of its reputation hole.

That’s because, in a sector with so few recognisable brands, a concept such as Careship could become the quality mark (like the Kite Mark or the Wool Mark) that creates a measure that consumers can, at last, understand.

As we move into the next phase of our work for the academy, we’re about to deliver a photoshoot that shows care workers elevated on big wooden boxes, a status higher than the rest of us. For isn’t that the image the care sector should etch in our minds?

Not a low status sector that people feel embarrassed to work in, but a proud and professional vocation that provides the backbone for the wellbeing of our country.

Simon Cotterrell is founding partner at Goosebumps brand consultancy