Domiciliary carers employed by Carmarthenshire Council do “substantially” more visits on their daily rounds than equivalent staff in the NHS – and some of them are in their 70s, a director said.

Jake Morgan paid tribute to the authority’s in-house carers, who visited mainly elderly, frail people in their homes and helped get them out of bed, washed, fed and in some cases ensuring they took their medicine.

Mr Morgan, director of the council’s community services, said it was tough and demanding work. “We’ve got some amazing people,” he said. Several of the carers received their state pension, he said, adding: “We’ve got a few in our 70s.”

Addressing the council’s health and social services scrutiny committee, Mr Morgan said the authority paid “well above the market rate” in domiciliary care terms, meaning its carers earned the equivalent as an NHS healthcare assistant. But, comparing the two roles, he said domiciliary carers did substantially more visits.

He said as someone who’d witnessed what they did first-hand he’d gained a deep level of respect.

There are significant recruitment issues across the care sector in the UK, leading to demand exceeding supply. The private and independent sector generally provide more domiciliary care than councils – in Carmarthenshire the split is 71% to 29% and the council’s share has been falling despite an ambition to get it to 50-50 over the next year.

Mr Morgan said the private sector was able to respond more flexibly, for example taking on staff when short-term Government funding became available. And it was often councils, he said, which took on clients who needed more complex home care or who lived in dispersed rural areas, making daily rounds less efficient than ones in towns.

He also said a consistent feature of the private sector was not paying domiciliary care staff for the first half-day or full day of sickness. “Rightly or wrongly that means they have much lower sickness levels,” he said.

The council’s different approach to this was “a good thing”, he said, but it helped explain in-house domiciliary carer sickness levels of 6% to 8%.

The committee heard that the council was constantly recruiting, partly via its Care Academi, which provides home care, residential care and social care training for newcomers.

There are around 1,000 Carmarthenshire residents who receive 11,700 hours of domiciliary care per week at present, helping them stay independent. A big success is that the number of people waiting to have domiciliary care has fallen sharply along with the number of hours that are spent waiting for that care.

This has been achieved partly by short-term Welsh Government funding aimed at discharging clinically well patients from hospital more quickly, and partly by commissioning more care providers.

Mr Morgan said that particular pot of Welsh Government funding had ended, and that although ministers had announced other additional funding council directors were still chasing the details about how it could be spent.

“We’ve got an awful lot of plans but we just can’t press the button,” he said.