Does your employer offer back-up elder care?
Hundreds do, among them corporations (Home Depot, Yahoo, Hewlett-Packard), universities (Columbia, Northwestern), hospitals (Houston Methodist, Memorial Sloan-Kettering), law firms, nonprofit organizations and several government agencies. They collectively cover millions of employees. It is not the solution we all want to the long-term care crisis and the over-reliance on unpaid family caregivers, but it could make your work life easier in a jam.
It usually operates this way: You’ve arranged home care for your mother, but her aide calls one night to say she has a sick child or a dead battery and can’t be there to help in the morning. Or you suddenly need care for your dad, who is being discharged from the hospital and for the next few days can’t make meals or take showers without assistance. You — naturally — have an important work deadline looming, or you have already used up your personal days for the year. Or you live two time zones away.
If you have registered for this benefit through your employer, you can contact a call center, which on a few hours’ notice will send a qualified home care aide from an agency in your town — or wherever the older person lives. The agencies screen and train the caregivers they send and run background checks.
Employers’ contracts vary, but through both Bright Horizons and Care.com, the country’s two largest suppliers of back-up programs for adults, you can typically use the service 10 to 20 times a year.
You pay for the service, at an average of $6 an hour; the company pays the rest. But you can skip the scrambling, the frantic phone calls, the day-long distraction of wondering whether someone showed up.
Bright Horizons began as a child care provider, then added elder care as employers began noticing that workers needed that kind of back-up, too. “There are different dynamics, but it causes the same stress and productivity challenges,” said David Lissy, chief executive of Bright Horizons. (He got a crash course when his mother was hospitalized a few years ago and “it forced my sister and me into this rotation of trips down to Florida.”)
Care.com has always offered both kinds of back-up, but adult care is growing fast, said Chris Duchesne, vice president of global workplace solutions. In 2011, about 20 percent of new clients opted to include it; the following year, that percentage had doubled. This year, it reached 50 percent. “As an employer, if you don’t think about this and plan for it, you’re sticking your head in the sand,” Mr. Duchesne tells prospective clients.
Employers want to keep you at your workplace, on the job. They don’t want to lose valued workers; they don’t want to have to hire and train temps. And they can read the handwriting on the demographic wall. They know that elder care can be more unpredictable and complex, and sometimes continue longer, than child care.
In fact, Care.com also offers employees senior care planning, in which licensed social workers recommend local services and options, from home modifications to financial planning, for adults who need care. Employees don’t pay for these consultations, and there’s no limit to the number of times they can call. Bright Horizons is planning a similar benefit.
Still, at most companies offering back-up care, employees are far more likely to use it for children. When it comes to seniors, “there’s this constant battle to get people aware the benefit is there,” Mr. Lissy said. “The adoption of it is still small.”
If you have used backup senior care through an employer program, we’d like to hear how it worked for you. Maybe it is a drop in the proverbial bucket, given how expensive and demanding caring for older adults can be, even when someone else is doing the hands-on job. But maybe it is an important step toward employers recognizing the changing landscape.