|
|
|
|
||
|
||
|
|
||
| SEARCH | SUBSCRIBE | ||
Some related articles : |
 |
Companies Adding Benefits for Care of the Elderly
When his elderly father fell on a snowy driveway last winter and had trouble getting up, William L'Hommedieu started to think about nursing homes. But he decided that his father could remain in his own home in Pleasant Valley, Mo., after a geriatric nurse made a detailed home evaluation and suggested a few modifications. He added a bathroom shower, for example, and an emergency call button. The home assessment — which helped give his father a new lease on living independently and provided some peace of mind for his family — was arranged and paid for by the United Automobile Workers union and the Ford Motor Company, Mr. L'Hommedieu's employer. It is part of a new class of corporate benefits being offered to some of the nation's 15 million or so workers who provide care for the elderly. Mirroring the evolution of corporate child care, the new programs move past brochures and hot lines to a more individualized approach. Some companies are now offering full-time geriatric care managers to advise employees and are providing in-home assessments by geriatric specialists like the nurse who helped Mr. L'Hommedieu, 53, and his father, Robert L'Hommedieu, 81. Ford, J. P. Morgan Chase and Pearson Education are among the companies that have begun offering such benefits in the last 18 months. "It's a quantum leap in the right direction," said Donna Wagner, a professor of gerontology at Towson University in Maryland. "It addresses the first questions that every caregiver asks: `Is something wrong with my mother?' and `Do I need to do something?' " For employers, geriatric care benefits make increasing sense. Corporate America loses around $11 billion a year because of absenteeism, turnover and lost productivity among full-time employees who care for elderly people, according to a 1997 study by the MetLife Mature Market Institute and the National Alliance for Caregiving. The drain is especially acute among those who do not live near the person they are caring for — about one-fourth of workers who take care of a relative who lives an hour or more away miss at least one day of work a month, the National Council on the Aging says. By law, many workers who care for elderly relatives can get time off. The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 provides 12 weeks of unpaid leave to workers in companies of 50 employees or more who have an immediate family member with a serious health condition. In recent years, companies have begun offering other kinds of help. About one-fifth of companies in the United States provide telephone resources and referral services on care for the elderly, up from 15 percent in 1998, according to the Society for Human Resource Management, a professional association based in Alexandria, Va. The group surveyed 550 companies, with work forces ranging from 1 to 80,000 employees. Rates vary by company, but about 5 percent of employees, on average, use child care services and about 3 percent use geriatric care benefits at any particular company, according to LifeCare Inc., a work-life benefits provider based in Westport, Conn. "There's been a lot of concern that maybe the eldercare services that employers were offering weren't what employees really needed," said Gail Gibson Hunt, the executive director of the National Alliance for Caregiving. While the new type of geriatric care benefits may prove more useful, the need for such care is often unpredictable. Most people do not think much about the subject or pay attention to related employee benefits until an older relative becomes ill or has an accident, or until signs of deterioration mount. Unlike child-rearing, geriatric care often involves sickness and legal or insurance tangles, matters that employees tend to struggle with privately. "We were in the process of getting ready to send him to a nursing home," said Mr. L'Hommedieu, whose home in Liberty, Mo., is about five minutes away from his father's house. The nurse's suggestions "extended his stay in his home by two or three years," he added. In the first 18 months of the program, 147 of Ford's 165,000 workers in North America have received an assessment for an elderly relative. In addition, 1,600 workers have had a telephone consultation with a specialist employed by the Ceridian Corporation, a company based in Minneapolis that administers Ford's work-life benefits. To carry out the assessments, Ceridian works with Coordinated Care Solutions of Coral Springs, Fla., a network of geriatric care managers. Despite the small initial numbers, some companies say they are confidence that geriatric care management benefits will catch on. "Employees were telling us over and over again, `It's great to call a number and get a resource, but I don't even know where to begin' ," said Heather Buehler, manager of work-life strategies for the PNC Financial Services Group, which began a pilot program in May offering geriatric care assessments to 7,000 employees at its headquarters in Pittsburgh. Last winter, Pearson Education, the textbook publishing unit of Pearson P.L.C., offered employees the services of an on-site care consultant who divided her time among the company's headquarters in Upper Saddle River, N.J., and three other offices nationwide, said Angela Schwers, vice president for human resources. During that pilot program, more than 100 employees met with the consultant. Prompted by that response, and by a survey last year showing that 16 percent of its 7,000 domestic employees had geriatric care responsibilities, Pearson recently hired four care managers to travel among six offices. In September, the company will begin offering care assessments through LifeCare. A half-hour session with a care manager costs Pearson about $100, while the price of an in-home assessment is $360 to $500, depending on the case and the region. Such benefits can help companies reduce employee turnover. In 1999, Fannie Mae, the mortgage agency, began offering on-site geriatric care consultations to 4,600 employees in the Washington area. Since then, about 750 employees have used the service, which costs the company $100,000 annually, and 30 percent of them said it had helped them with a situation that, if left unresolved, would have caused them to leave their jobs, the company said, based on a recent survey. About one-fifth of people who provide care for the elderly, in fact, leave their jobs at least temporarily because of those responsibilities, according to a 1997 report by AARP. Janis Smith, director of financial communications at Fannie Mae, did not have to quit working while caring for her mother, a stroke victim, over the past 17 years. But she found that those responsibilities often hurt her productivity until she joined Fannie Mae two years ago and began using the company's geriatric care consultant, Rebecca Keller. "If there is research to be done, a lot of people to see and talk to, I used to have to take time off to handle it," said Mrs. Smith. Now she contacts the consultant with any question or issue. For many companies, care assessment benefits are not likely to replace other geriatric care resource and referral programs, because a smaller percentage of employees is expected to use them compared to the other benefits. But they give employers a strategy to prepare for the future, when a higher proportion of workers and their families will be older. "Everyone's waiting for this eldercare boom to happen," said Christine Fossaceca, work-life solutions manager at J. P. Morgan Chase, which began offering a geriatric care assessment program in April 2001. "It may not be a bang, but it's happening. We want to be prepared for that." FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Global Action on Aging distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
|
