The Singapore Association of Social Workers (SASW) and the Health Ministry plan to create a pool of part-time social workers to help plug manpower gaps at nursing homes and hospices.

This was announced by SASW president Alvin Chua at a Social Workers' Day 2013 event on Saturday.

Mr Chua hopes the pilot scheme can help ease the manpower crunch in the social service sector once it is launched this year.

Currently, there are 1,600 registered social workers and social service practitioners.

The scheme involves pooling together trained social-workers who are no longer working full-time and matching them to the various nursing homes who may need their services on an ad-hoc basis.

"As an ageing population, we have greater needs in this area," said Mr Chua.

"If this is successful, we would be able to replicate it further to cover other areas in the social service sector, including the family service centres."