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Effective management and leadership in social care are essential for effective care worker performance, which, in turn, enables high-quality care.

This , commissioned by the Australian Association of Gerontology and written by IER's Professor Philip Taylor, highlights the critical need to understand better the nature and challenges of care management and leadership against a backdrop of growing demand for care and predicted shortfalls in the supply of workers to the sector.

In September, along with Sydney University colleagues Dr Angie Knox and Prof. Phil Bohle, Dr Sally Wright and Prof. Chris Warhurst of IER submitted evidence to the Australian Senate鈥檚 Select Committee Inquiry into Work and Care.

Dr Sally Wright co-authored a journal article about workplace innovations in the UK social care and Swedish health sectors. The , based on case studies completed for the European Commission's Horizon 2020 Quality of Jobs and Innovation-generated Employment Outcomes (QuInnE) project, was recently published in the .

Mathieu, C., Wright, S., Boethius, S. and Green, A. (2020). '', European Journal of Workplace Innovation, 5(2): 4-30.

led on a report, , with Wales Public Services 2025 colleagues Joe Ogle and Michael Trickey, analysing health and social care spending patterns in Wales over 2009-10 to 2015-16, and the issues that this raises for the future of public services financing and sustainability . This work builds on Daria's earlier contribution to the Institute of Fiscal Studies Green Budget (February, 2017), and provides the basis for further analysis of public services provision in Wales.

The main findings were that spending on NHS Wales has been growing as a proportion of all spending allocated to the Welsh government for day-to-day running of public services, which raises questions about the extent to which non-NHS public services, such as social care, can be financed. While day-to-day spending on local authority-organised adult social services has remained broadly flat in real terms in Wales, the increasing over-65 population in Wales means that spending per older person has fallen by over 12% in real terms over 2009-10 to 2015-16. Wales would need to be spending at least an additional £129 million by 2020-21 (at 2016-17 prices) to bring the per capita spend on local authority social services for over-65s back to 2009-10 levels. In the current austerity context, this raises questions about budgetary trade-offs and decisions about spending priorities. The authors will be exploring these issues in their next report.

In the next podcast about our work at the Institute for Employment Research, Bernard Casey talks about his research on older workers and the effects of working longer on health and well-being. Bernard also considers how employment, pensions and social cares systems interrelate, together with the effect of working longer on people’s physical and mental health.