Foreign social care staff to be welcomed to UK amid concerns omicron will wipe out workers

Hithere

"specifically, foreign care workers need to be able to speak English and without a strong accent"

?

Me too. I AM English but I've been told I've got a very strong accent. Also, I'm clumsy and not good with manual labour. A stroppy teenager I CAN deal with though.

Hithere
It’s another of those elephant in the room problems.
Everyone from carers, the management, the relatives of residents can see the elephant but nobody can talk about it.

Bodach

How is this "Backpedaling (sic) on Brexit"? Surely this is part and parcel of Brexit - that we can decide what immigrants we need to meet specific skill shortages, rather than be open to all EU-comers?

Exactly!
????

Having seen the care provided first hand, some of the kindest, gentlest and most popular nurses and healthcare support workers with patients in the NHS are Filipinos and Eastern Europeans, yes their accents can be difficult to understand when they first arrive, but they are first rate at bedside care and always have a smile - which really matters.
It annoys me intensely when people deride overseas staff because of their accents - how hard is it to understand that they are as good at the job as British people, and many of them genuinely want to do it, unlike press-ganged Brits being suggested as an alternative, who have no interest at all in working in care?

So let me see -
1. There is a huge demand in a certain niche in the market (carers),
2. whose nationals dont want to fill out due to the bad job conditions, pay and high expectations and
3. Once the foreign nationals emigrate to help you cover that need, instead of being grateful, the worry is how they are going to impact the world of the nationals (housing, utilities, legal rights, etc?

Wow, I wonder why nobody is lining.
How is doing a favour to whom?

Unfortunately, threads like this reaffirm the stereotype of English people being racist, xenophobic and unwelcoming.

Communication has nothing to do with languages and accents, but with tolerance and adaptation to each other

I also believe the job market might be assisted by delivery drivers who have HGV licences helping out in that area and the unemployed who can become delivery drivers helping out there.

the UK's unemployed who can read, write and speak English should be trained to become care workers otherwise lose their unemployment benefit

I really don't think working as a carer with vulnerable / elderly / sick people is something you can force on the unemployed.

Dealing with the often intimate needs of patients is really not something that everyone can do - or do with kindness and consideration for the individual.

The patients themselves can also be difficult and demanding and you need a certain mentality to deal with this kind of thing.

Your suggestion really rather downgrades the work that carers do - it isn't just another 'job'...

Forcing people to take the job of carer or lose their benefits is just asking for trouble.

It may be a 'job' on paper, but in reality, it's something quite different.

You might as well also argue - as one minister did I believe some time ago - that the unemployed (particularly women) should be forced to take jobs in the sex industry (with certain provisos) as long as the work was legitimate. You know, because it's a 'job' and the unemployed shouldn't have a choice. Perhaps we should force unemployed males to join the Army to train to fight... where draw the line with this?

The principle is all wrong.

Casdon

Having seen the care provided first hand, some of the kindest, gentlest and most popular nurses and healthcare support workers with patients in the NHS are Filipinos and Eastern Europeans, yes their accents can be difficult to understand when they first arrive, but they are first rate at bedside care and always have a smile - which really matters.
It annoys me intensely when people deride overseas staff because of their accents - how hard is it to understand that they are as good at the job as British people, and many of them genuinely want to do it, unlike press-ganged Brits being suggested as an alternative, who have no interest at all in working in care?

I haven’t come across Eastern Europeans in the NHS (hospitals and the care sector) but the Filipino nurses and workers have been wonderful, ditto the Indian ( not British born but here from India) nurses and doctors.I have found them, along with British staff, the absolute best.

When my mother was in a hospice in the few weeks before she died, most of the staff, including the manager, were Romanian - without exception, they were excellent.

Let's go the whole hog and let prisoners out on parole to work in Care Homes. I find suggestions that unemployed people be forced to work in the care sector quite appalling. As Dickens said this downgrades work that carers do and puts the most vulnerable people in our society at risk.

The population of the UK is still rising and according to worldpopulationreview.com/countries/united-kingdom-population will continue to rise. Brexit or no Brexit, people still want to live in Britain in preference to many other countries.

Nothing much is working at the moment so not a great time to judge Brexit unless, of course, that is your sole purpose.