In the position, which was developed as part of a dedicated hearing carried out by the European Commission on April 7 on a new EU Care Strategy, CESI welcomes the initiative of the EU to address existing and rising challenges in the child care and long-term care sector in a holistic, European-wide manner.

In the position, CESI highlights in particular that an EU Care Strategy should:

1. match the supply of affordable and high quality care to increasing levels of demand. Considerable investments, in particular public investments, are needed in many Member States to improve the availability of accessibility, affordability and quality of long-term care and early childhood education and care services. This concerns above all facilities and care infrastructure. In particular, an EU Care Strategy should help ensure that the sector is well prepared and sufficiently resilient to provide quality services also during crises, in particular by taking lessons learnt from the Covid pandemic.
2. help step up staff attraction and staff retention. This will most notably require measures for better employment and working conditions in the care sector. Measures should span to pay levels, stress and strain exposure, occupational health and safety standards, and an improved public perception of care professionals and the important work they carry out.
3. better formalise the long–term care sector. Beyond the necessities about generally better working conditions in the care sector, and in conjunction with point 1 above, there is a need for informal and home–based carers to receive an adequate training, recognition, and qualification of the care services they provide. They should benefit from the experience and know–how gathered by already highly qualified personnel, who could act as facilitators and case managers of the persons looked after, flagging potential problems and helping, on a regular basis, to improve the care system and practices. The integration between the social and the health aspects in the context of home care is central: providing direct care, detecting needs and referring to professionals and institutions when needed.
   Moreover, as part of the European Strategy for Active and Healthy Ageing, an EU Care Strategy should help make more tools available at national level for recognizing the skills of carers. Nurses, physiotherapists, auxiliary and technical staff and social workers give important support to both formal and informal caregivers and their role and work is not always sufficiently recognised at the national level. Through an EU Care Strategy recognising their role as case managers, their skills and competences should be better evaluated and used in local contexts.
   
4. further professionalise the child care sector. An EU Care Strategy should encourage the inclusion of social–health experts in all child care programmes.
   
5. create a level-playing field to ensure a balance in the provision of accessible, affordable and high-quality care services across regions and countries. Care-related disparities, which are fostered by a borderless Single Market to the detriment of less advantaged countries, need to be mediated and tackled by the EU. The Single Market needs a social dimension which also addresses structural imbalances in labour migration, especially in the care sector.
   An EU Care Strategy should be sensitive to push-and-pull factors of care professionals. It should help strike a balance between the principle of free movement of (care) workers and (care) services on the one hand and the fostering of framework conditions in the care sector that do not make care professionals leave for other places. The framework should also consider the difficult situation of countries outside the EU, e.g. in the Balkan region, which lose care professionals to a degree that this poses a threat to their own care structures.
   An EU Care Strategy should integrate the EU’s social, cohesion, structural and investments funds to put a particular emphasis to improve the employment and working conditions in less developed regions of the EU, in order to prevent brain drains of health professionals and reduce push factors of labour towards the more well-off Member States and regions. Likewise, an EU Care Strategy should gear EU pre-accession assistance and neighbourhood policies increasingly in this direction. In addition, an EU Care Strategy could encourage bilateral or multilateral intergovernmental agreements to establish frames for ethical, sustainable and fair migration (and returns) of care sector workers.
6. ensure inclusive consultation and social dialogue for affordable, accessible and high quality care services. The European Commission should ensure the organisation of a social dialogue among sectoral unions and employers and their effective coordination with policy makers in order to help accompany the monitoring and implementation of an EU Care Strategy. At EU level, this should translate into a social dialogue on care/social services which is inclusive: All actors which, as per applicable representativeness study of Eurofound, fulfil the conditions of Commission Decision 98/500/EC to be fully recognised social partners, should be given the opportunity to participate in a European social dialogue care/social services sector – including CESI.

The full position is available here.