Professional care workforce: a rapid review of evidence supporting methods of recruitment, retention, safety, and education.

"Declarations Ethics approval and consent to participateNot applicable. Consent for publicationNot applicable. Competing interestsThe authors declare that they have no competing interests. Competing interests The authors declare that they have no competing interests."

"Funding This rapid review was funded by the Academic and Research Collaborative in Health (ARCH) at La Trobe University."

"The rapid review, focussed on the professional care workforce, was prospectively registered with PROSPERO (PROSPERO 2022 CRD42022371721 https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/display_record.php?ID=CRD42022371721) and PRISMA [, ]. The approach was based on methods of Murad et al. (2017), who suggested how review results can be synthesised and the certainty of evidence estimated when a meta-analysis cannot be completed. Defining the care workforce can be a challenge []. For example, the line between direct and indirect care is often not made clear, where workers such as cleaners and chefs play an important but indirect role in care. In addition, for people receiving support to live in the community, unpaid care plays a crucial and often under-acknowledged role []. For this review, we examined the professional care workforce, defined as paid, educated, skilled workers providing direct care in home, community, hospital, residential aged care and other social service settings. We did not examine the literature on personal care assistants, nursing assistants or allied health assistants. The research question for the review was, what methods can improve the recruitment, retention, safety, and education of the professional care workforce? Conclusions: Given the critical importance of recruiting and retaining a strong health and care workforce, there is an immediate need to develop a cohesive strategy to address workforce shortfalls. This paper presents initial evidence on different interventions to address this need, and to inform care workforce recruitment and retention.: Rapid Review registration PROSPERO 2022 CRD42022371721 Available from: https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/display_record.php?ID=CRD42022371721"