What employers get wrong about caregiving benefits
The support most plans buy covers the emergency. The load employees actually carry is administrative, and it is daily.
Ask a benefits leader what they have in place for caregiving and you will usually hear about the employee assistance programme. It is a reasonable answer. It is also an answer about crisis, and caregiving is mostly not a crisis. It is a standing weekly load of refills, results, forms and follow-ups, carried by someone who also has a job.
The load is administrative, not clinical
Statistics Canada put 13.4 million Canadians, 42 percent of everyone aged 15 and over, in the unpaid-care column in 2022. Those caring for an adult with a long-term condition spent a median of eight hours a week doing it. That time is not spent in appointments. It is spent booking them, remembering them, chasing the results afterwards and repeating the family’s medical history to the next person who asks.
- 16 percent of caregivers changed their work schedule to keep up.
- 7 percent cut their weekly hours.
- 5 percent stopped working for pay altogether.
A benefit that answers the phone at 2am does not help the person who cannot find their mother’s medication list at 2pm.
Why the gap persists
Benefits stacks are bought in categories, and there is no category called “the paperwork of caring for someone”. So the work stays invisible: it does not appear in claims data, it rarely appears in an absence code, and the people carrying it are the least likely to raise their hand.
What actually closes it
The thing that helps is unglamorous. One place where a household’s records, medications and appointments live together, that reads incoming documents and files them without being asked, and that can answer a question in the language the person asks it in.
Sources
Statistics Canada, Canadian Social Survey, 2022.