Benvenuti

Photo courtesy Janet Simpson Benvenuti

Although I didn’t realize it until much later, my life changed the day I agreed to become legally responsible for my 78-year-old father and my 77-year-old mother, who suffered from lung cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, respectively. I was in my thirties, restructuring the marketing organization for a large regional bank, and my husband, Ray Benvenuti (MBA 1986), and I had two children under seven. At that time, I had no inkling of what would be required to juggle the needs of two dying parents and two households, along with my clients, my children, and Ray’s demanding travel schedule.

To supervise my parents’ care, I relocated my family to Boston, five miles from their home, and Ray and I began commuting to our jobs in Manhattan. I soon discovered the challenges of aging in America: the lack of coordinated medical care, the misuse of pharmaceuticals, the gap between the medical and the mental health systems, and the time required to find community resources and quality home care. My previous experience as a pharmaceutical executive and management consultant seemed child’s play compared with now trying to preserve my parents’ quality of life. Caring for my parents at home until the end, even with professional help, eventually became a full-time job.

Today, 55 million Americans support at least one older loved one, and many countries face similar challenges. In the United States, 75 percent of these family caregivers for relatives over the age of 50 also hold down jobs. Nearly three-quarters of those caregivers report a negative impact on their work lives. With 10,000 baby boomers turning 65 daily, the current estimate of $17–$33 billion in annual productivity losses will certainly increase.

For business leaders interested in the health, productivity, and retention of their experienced employees, addressing the issue of aging and elder care makes both economic and strategic sense. Yet the number of employers offering elder-care referrals is declining sharply. Twenty years ago, faced with the challenge of child care, progressive companies led the way in finding solutions that enabled parents to work worry-free. Today, we need to make the integration of wellness programs with elder care a strategic priority.

The best practices in elder care are well known but inconsistently delivered through firms’ internal resources or employee assistance programs. One simple change, to have information and referral requests managed by experienced geriatric-care managers, would dramatically improve utilization of services. Corporate wellness programs and policies such as flextime or paid time off for caregiving purposes can reduce the stress that worsens health.

My tenure as my parents’ caregiver lasted a decade. In time, feelings of frustration, exhaustion, and grief over the loss of work that I loved and the parents I was losing were eventually replaced by a profound satisfaction as my children, my siblings, and I filled their last years with joy and laughter. During that time I discovered that too few people understand the aging journey in all its complexities. I wrote a book and founded a company to help adults navigate the last years of life successfully by proactively making the legal, financial, medical, and care-giving decisions that, left unaddressed, lead to continual crisis management.

Despite the sea change under way in health-care delivery, caregiving will remain high touch, not high tech. Let’s spare our caregiving employees the loss of inordinate time and money by ensuring that the organizations we lead have well-designed programs and policies that support them. For the benefit of our employees and our companies, it’s time to break the silence around caregiving.

—Janet Simpson Benvenuti (MBA 1985) is the author of Don’t Give Up on Me! Supporting Aging Parents Successfully and the founder of Circle of Life Partners, an advisory practice on aging.

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