January Currents Issue,  2005

Companies Recognize the Growing Needs of Caregivers in the Workforce

By Carolyn McIntyre, LCSW-R, CEAP, APS Healthcare Consultant

For over 8 years, I have been an onsite EAP counselor for Pfizer Inc., a pharmaceutical company with over 100,000 employees worldwide. As an onsite counselor, I provide confidential counseling and referral services as well as manager consultations. I also provide seminars on balancing work and family and on stress management. Through my EAP work at Pfizer, I realized that social workers have a tremendous opportunity to expand their role in the area of services to working caregivers of elderly relatives.

Pfizer initiated a program to address the needs of their own working caregivers. In 2002, they hosted focus groups for caregivers and launched a new effort to meet some of the needs of their working caregivers. The following year, the company also sponsored nine speakers who discussed various topics related to eldercare.

Employees Seek Elder-Care Focus Groups
I became involved in this effort when I heard a staff person say that the caregivers gained as much support attending a focus group as they did from hearing experts. I offered to facilitate an onsite caregiver support group. To get the group started, I attended the nine-eldercare speaker events, introduced myself, gave a brief explanation of the support group, and soon had 5 to 8 people attending the group.

The support group that I began in 2003 is still going. It meets every other week and the members discuss the stresses of caregiving and how to manage them better. Some members live with an elderly relative and some don’t. Although most members are women, male caregivers attend as well. The group changes, as members’ situations change, but word of mouth has kept membership up. I have been impressed with the amount of resource sharing by the members. Members will download information from web sites or bring copies of articles to share.

Onsite Caregiver Support Groups Are Good for Companies Too
Some of the members of the group were leaving work early to attend offsite groups. The onsite group meets during the lunch hour and there is no pressure to attend. Members report that the onsite group is helpful because everyone there understands the stress of balancing their jobs with caregiving. Because of the enormous demands of caregiving, companies are at risk of losing valued employees. Companies that offer services, such as onsite caregiver support groups and the traditional services of the EAP and Work/Life benefits, are seen as a valuable resource to the caregiver.

Caregiving Means Huge Costs to Businesses
Pfizer may be ahead of the trend for providing services to working caregivers but the numbers would indicate that other companies and organizations will soon follow suit. A 1997 National Family Caregiver Study estimated that U.S. businesses might be losing as much as $29 billion annually in decreased productivity because of elder caregiving. This, in-cludes absenteeism, replacement costs, work interruptions, and presenteeism: time spent on calling hospitals, doctors, Medicare, etc.

Investment in Social Work Pays Off
Fannie Mae is a leader in offering an onsite eldercare specialist to make all the time-consuming phone calls that working caregivers have to make - a model to be considered by other programs. They got started by contacting their local Area Agency on Aging and then contracted with them to provide an on-site social worker. The Fannie Mae program started with a once-per-week eldercare consultant whose time was quickly expanded. Fannie Mae surveys show that, without the program, about one fourth of the employees said they would have had to leave the company. Over half also said it saved them time away from work.

Providing services to caregivers in the work force is a natural and exciting opportunity for social workers and a growing demand. We should continue to create and look for opportunities to bring our skills to this new arena. The more we help working caregivers keep their jobs, while caregiving, the more we can prevent depression and job losses amongst this valuable segment of the population. Some creative thinking and risk-taking is what we need to get started.

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