Empowering the Employed Caregiver:
A Shift in Focus for Elder Care
(Article originally published by WFC Resources, September 2004, as a Guest
Column written by John Paul Marosy, president of Bringing Elder Care Home LLC)
Leading employers have begun shifting the focus of their work/life initiatives
that support employees caring for aging relatives, offering employees access to
empowering experiences like on-line skill-building courses and telephonic
support groups. This new approach complements and goes beyond the traditional
elder care information and consultation model. This article describes two such
efforts:
- “Powerful Tools for Caregiving,” an initiative of the American Business
Collaboration for Quality Dependent Care (ABC) and Mather Lifeways
Institute on Aging and
- the AT&T Telephone Caregiver Support Groups.
In the late 1980’s, pioneering companies like IBM, Johnson and Johnson,
and others began offering elder care consultation and referral (C&R). Modeled
after childcare resource and referral programs, these initiatives gathered vast
amounts of information about elder care programs and services and made the
information available to employees via trained counselors. The idea was to both
cut the time the employee spent looking for information and to improve the
quality of decisions that employees made about elder care situations.
Over the past 15 years, the information-based model has evolved to include
user-friendly databases that include every conceivable topic related to elder
care. Today’s corporate elder care programs deliver instant access to such
information via the Internet. Some have added telephonic and on-line information
sessions on elder care topics and even company-paid geriatric care management
services that arrange for an in-home assessment and development of a care plan
for the older relative.
Beyond Information: “Powerful Tools”
Recent research has documented the financial cost of unrelieved caregiver
stress in terms of negative health outcomes and increased medical costs. The key
to avoiding such costs – and keeping employees with elder care responsibilities
healthier – is to intervene earlier. This means not only providing information
about services, but expanding the employee’s coping skills, thus empowering the
employee to take control of this vitally important aspect of life.
The Mather Lifeways Institute on Aging (Mather) developed “Powerful Tools for
Caregiving” to help family caregivers of elders cope. First offered in community
settings, “Powerful Tools” began as a six-session series of interactive
workshops, with an accompanying 300-page Caregiver Helpbook.
The program’s design included an evaluation component from day one, enabling
Mather to document the program’s impact. Statistically significant findings from
the original community groups show improvements in self-confidence, self-care
activities (relaxation and physical exercise) and increased use of support
services, like adult day care, chore services, care management and support
groups.
Judy Presser of WFD Consulting (judith.presser@wfd.com)
is coordinating implementation of the “Powerful Tools” pilot project at ABC
champion companies ExxonMobil, IBM, and Texas Instruments. She
says that the fact that Mather had the evaluation data to show program results
provided the impetus needed to fund an adaptation of the approach to the
workplace setting. “The stress of caregiving and the related illnesses and use
of medical care and prescription drugs was a concern,” says Presser. “We wanted
something that could be replicated, not tied to geography. And it was an
evaluated product where you could say ‘This works.’ “
The ABC pilot project is underway. It offers a self-paced, on-line learning
module, combined with a weekly telephone call-in time and on-line chat groups.
About 200 employees from the three firms have taken the six-week course so far.
The ABC pilot program will also measure job performance.
Do the ABC companies have an ROI target in mind? “We will be looking for some
health and wellness outcomes, says Presser. “You could translate this into an
ROI. We went into this hoping that it will help employees manage their
caregiving roles better. If this is achieved, then there will be an ROI, even if
we don’t measure it. If it’s successful, you’ll know there is an ROI.”
Dan Kuhn, Mather’s education director,
dkuhn@matherlifeways.com says “The
experiment is to find out if caregivers using the web-based model can derive
some or all of the benefits that caregivers have derived in the live experience
at our sites in Chicago area. We’re grateful for the opportunity to test this
out and we hope it’ll be effective and become available to other companies and
individuals who are interested in taking care of themselves via this course.”
AT&T’s Telephone Support Groups
AT&T is taking a telephonic approach to employee caregiver empowerment. The
company began offering its employees and their spouses access to telephonic
elder care support groups in March 2003. Today, seven support groups meet on a
weekly basis.
The support groups are limited to a maximum of seven participants each, and
they meet at a variety of times of the day and days of the week, drawing callers
from all over the U.S., according to Aimee Barr, an elder care counselor who
facilitates some of the groups. Barr is an employee of Atlantic Health System,
the contractor who operates the service with funding from a grant from the AT&T
Family Care Development Fund.
How it works
- Employees learn about the availability of elder care support groups in
many ways, including word-of-mouth, AT&T’s internal website, AT&T
publications, and through the efforts of Bernadette Fusaro, Director of the
Family Care Development Fund, who visits work sites and informs managers
and employees about this and other programs supported by the Fund.
- When an employee calls or sends an email expressing interest, Barr or
another elder care counselor conducts a brief telephone interview to determine
if the telephone support group is an appropriate option for the caller.
- If appropriate, the employee or spouse is informed of the dates and times
of the support groups, selects one, and is given a passcode to join the
conversation, as well as a book entitled “Caring for You, Caring for Me,”
developed by the Rosalynn Carter Institute.
- After participating in all or some of the ten weekly sessions, the
employee receives a follow-up call from an elder care counselor to obtain
feedback on the experience and to assure that the employee or spouse is
directed to follow-up elder care resources, if needed.
After participating in all or some of the ten weekly sessions, the employee
receives a follow-up call from an elder care counselor to obtain feedback on the
experience and to assure that the employee or spouse is directed to follow-up
elder care resources, if needed.
- A stronger sense of the importance of their dual roles as employee and
caregiver
- Fresh ideas from others who have “been there, done that”
- More insight into what their older relatives are going through
- Better understanding of the resources available, both from AT&T and from
public agencies like Medicaid and Medicare, and
- New ways to find out about long term care options in the community
“We have two goals in operating this program,” says Barr, “ First: Don’t
compromise confidentiality. Second: Don’t compromise convenience. We have people
who are sometimes working 12-16 hours per day. The telephone access allows them
to do this at their office or at home, whatever’s most convenient. We bring the
service to them.”
Although no one is asked to reveal his or her name or job title in the course
of group discussions, Barr says she has gleaned enough information from the
conversations to know that the groups have drawn employees from every level of
the AT&T.
The groups are diverse in terms of the elder care situations that
participants face, as well, according to Barr. “Some are caring for persons with
Alzheimer’s disease, some with Parkinson's or other ailments. The diversity
allows people to gain perspective and allows those who are new to caregiving to
connect with those who have experience. They are great at sharing resources that
have been helpful to others, like suggestions on who to find a good geriatrician
or elder law attorney.”
Barr says the call-in approach appears to be a good cultural fit for AT&T:
“Because we work with people who are very good communicators on the phone and
people who are technologically savvy, they are used to dealing with things on a
technological level. Some are in virtual office situations that allow them to
work from home, relying on communication via telephone and their personal
computer.”
The program includes an evaluation component, measuring each participant’s
degree of “perceived caregiving burden” before and after participating in a
support group. “Coming into the groups, participants are all over the place (in
terms of perceived caregiving burden),” says Barr. At the end of the sessions,
the results have been positive. “The employees have written in very positive
comments on the evaluation forms,” she says.
What does the future hold for elder care support groups at AT&T? “It’s going
very well,” says Barr. “I’d just like to see it continue.”
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Besides being president of
Bringing Elder Care Home LLC, a training
and consulting firm specializing in elder care/work balance, John Paul Marosy is
the author of A Manager’s Guide to Elder Care and Work and Elder Care:
A Six Step Guide to Balancing Work and Family. |
