Staying On the Job, When Dementia Hits
By Marjo Johne, The
Globe and Mail
July 5, 2012
Canada
Photo Credit: Kevin Van Paassen, The Globe
and Mail
People diagnosed with dementia want to stay on
the job as long as they can says Judith Plotkin,
vice-president, strategic growth for Homewood
Human Solutions.
Shortly after
learning that she had early-onset Alzheimer’s
disease, a university professor met with her
supervisor to talk about how she could continue
working while managing her condition, which is
the most common form of dementia in Canada.
The professor’s well-meaning supervisor
responded by assigning the professor to a
lower-level class. But within a week, the school
received several complaints from her new group
of students and the professor, who was in her
early fifties, had to leave her job.
“In trying to be helpful, the university put her
in a position where she was having to learn new
things and follow new directions rather than
doing what she was already very familiar with,”
said the professor’s husband, who asked that he
and his wife not be identified.
“In hindsight, I know it was the wrong thing to
do,” he said of the events of two years ago.
“But at the time, neither we nor the
administrators at her workplace knew the best
way to respond.”
More than 500,000 Canadians have dementia – a
number expected to increase to more than one
million over the next 25 years, according to a
2010 report by the Alzheimer Society of Canada.
The disease, whose symptoms include declining
memory, reasoning and judgment, is associated
largely with advancing age, but can also be
caused by pre-existing health conditions such as
high blood pressure, obesity and stroke.
While dementia is more prevalent among the
elderly, it can also affect the under-65 working
group. About 71,000 Canadians who have dementia
are under the age of 65.
And given the baby-boomer bulge, work places
across the country are likely to see more cases
of dementia, said David Harvey, chief of public
policy and program initiatives at Alzheimer
Society of Ontario in Toronto.
Corporate Canada is already feeling the economic
impact of dementia, which resulted in about
$3-billion in lost productivity and profits in
2008, according to the Alzheimer Society of
Canada report. By 2038, these losses could more
than double to roughly $6.8-billion.
“There are a growing number of older workers in
the workplace,” Mr. Harvey said. “When you look
at data from the U.S. Labour Force survey, you
see that the number of workers over the age of
65 doubles in the first decade of this century,
even before the first wave of baby boomers
started to reach the age of 65, which was last
year.”
Advances in medicine are leading to earlier
diagnoses of dementia, years before symptoms of
the disease start to appear, Mr. Harvey noted.
At the same time, patients today have greater
access to drugs that can slow down the onset of
symptoms.
For employers, this could translate to more
workers staying on the job after being diagnosed
with dementia.
“People today are wanting to stay in the
workplace longer, and that’s good because it
helps them stay active, engaged and cognitively
sharp,” said Judith Plotkin, vice-president,
strategic growth for Homewood Human Solutions,
which provides health and wellness programs.
“At the same time, we are seeing employers
increasingly wanting to preserve the knowledge
base in their company, which usually means
retaining their highly experienced employees,”
Ms. Plotkin said.
Under human rights laws, employers must
accommodate workers with dementia, to the point
where doing so would cause “undue hardship” to
the company, said Hermie Abraham, a Toronto
employment lawyer.
Depending on the employee’s dementia symptoms,
this could mean changing things such as job
duties or hours of work.
In small companies with only a few employees,
accommodating a worker with dementia might not
be easy – or at all possible, Ms. Abraham noted.
“But be careful how you proceed,” she cautions
employers. “In smaller organizations that have
no human resource department, sometimes the
first knee-jerk reaction might be to terminate
the employee, inadvertently creating liability
for the company.”
Whether workers with dementia stay in their
current role or switch to duties adapted to
accommodate their symptoms, they can continue
contributing to the workplace with the right
strategies and adequate support, said Annette
Gibbs, a Toronto-based vice-president of group
life and disability claims for Sun Life
Financial Inc.
For example, dementia symptoms often appear
first thing in the morning or at the end of the
day, so adjusting working hours might be a good
strategy, she said.
Assigning a work buddy to an employee with
dementia is also a good idea. But employers
should take care to ensure the buddy is a proper
fit; preferably it is someone who has worked
closely with the employee.
People with early-stage dementia are generally
able to work well in areas they’re already
familiar with, “but suddenly changing their work
patterns or introducing them to new tasks can
really throw them off,” Ms. Gibbs said.
The university professor’s husband agrees. Being
assigned to another class meant his wife had to
learn a new curriculum, which put even more
stress on her. “There were too many changes all
at once,” he recalled.
Ms. Plotkin at Homewood urges employees with
dementia who want to continue working to adopt
strategies that will help them stay organized
and track what they’re doing throughout the day.
Strategies could include reminder notes and
e-mail alerts for every task, and recording
meetings and phone calls.
“If you’re giving a presentation, you may want
to list all your talking points on a white board
and check each one off as you go along,” she
said.
Both employer and employee should agree to
regular performance reviews, she added, to
ensure the worker is meeting the requirements
and targets of the modified job and to make
adjustments where needed.
Safety is something employers need to be extra
vigilant about when supporting an employee with
dementia, Ms. Plotkin said. A worker who
operates machinery, for example, might be better
off moved to the mail room. And when it becomes
clear that retaining a worker with dementia
presents a risk not only to the worker but to
others, including customers, the company should
move to letting the employee go.
As companies face the prospect of seeing more
workers with dementia, employers need to develop
a more supportive culture for people with
cognitive disabilities and mental health issues,
said Mr. Harvey at the Alzheimer Society of
Ontario.
Companies should train their managers and
workers to understand various brain disorders,
to recognize symptoms, and learn how best to
respond.
“It’s important that we not automatically equate
dementia with an absolute inability to perform
work,” he stressed.
Mr. Harvey cited the case of a paint-store
employee who learned she had dementia. Instead
of letting her go for fear she might not be able
to mix colours properly, the manager transferred
her to reception duties, greeting customers and
directing to them to other staff.
“She was able to perform adequately in that job
for two years before making the decision to
retire,” he said.
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