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Abstract
In a period when recruitment and retention are crucial issues in health and social care the focus of this paper is:
| • | Who are the workforce of health and social care? | ||||
| • | What are the needs of that workforce? | ||||
| • | How safe is it for the much smaller partner, social care, to work together with the much larger health care? | ||||
The latter point heads us back to the sub‐title of the paper: can a duck sleep with a hippopotamus?
This question comes from an advert used in the UK for a bed manufacturer, where our British sensitivities and fear of sex prevents us from showing a man and a woman in a double bed, what the Spanish charmingly call a ‘cama de matrimonio’, a marriage bed, and instead we show a hippopotamus and a duck sleeping, safely, in the same bed.
To follow this analogy, we have to show:
| • | that health and social care are in the same bed; | ||||
| • | that one is as large as a hippopotamus, and the other as small as a duck; | ||||
| • | what the dangers are of this; | ||||
and ask the question:
| • | What is there in the place of ‘spring technology’ which would permit both to sleep together, and for the duck not to end up flat? | ||||
In doing so, I hope to answer the first three questions I posed.