On the one hand, we lack caregivers and home helpers and, on the other, we have millions of French people who help a dependent loved one and who therefore develop skills. A bill, which has just been adopted, proposes to create bridges between the two worlds.
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It’s about recognizing that when you take care, in your everyday life, of a loved one who is dependent or at the end of life, you learn to do a lot of things. It can be the toilet, the transfer of the armchair to the bed, to arrange the residence, to coordinate the work of the professionals who intervene with the person who is accompanied, to fill administrative files. It can also be making a bandage, administering medication or placing a catheter. So many skills that are precisely those of caregivers or home helpers. However, initial training does not currently provide enough of these professionals. It will therefore be necessary to find them among caregivers. This is what this new bill proposes when on Tuesday, September 13, the national ethics council is to submit a long-awaited report on the end of life.
It is a question of helping these caregivers to retrain, to recognize the skills acquired in their family life. The mechanism is known, it is the validation of acquired experience, the VAE. The bill, which must be examined by the National Assembly in the fall, must allow people who are very invested in helping a loved one to obtain certifications to begin, as the specialized site Actuel RH specifies, a professional retraining towards old age professions. A sector where recruitment tensions are very strong.
It is estimated that eleven million French people are family caregivers and that this represents one in ten employees, according to France Strategies. These people to convert to old age and dependency professions will be helped and financed in the preparation and constitution of their file for validation of acquired experience.
Stages considered long and difficult, especially for the least qualified candidates and which discourage a large number of them. Beyond the situation of family caregivers, the government intends to breathe new life into VAE. And make it an anti-unemployment weapon. It has set itself the goal of reaching 100,000 diplomas or professional titles acquired by VAE each year by 2027. We are still only at 22,000.