Caregiving Workforce Transitions

Caregiving Contaminates National Employment

As our population ages and the workforce becomes more demanding, the collision between family caregiving and work is a source of significant stress. This problem is left for families to solve.

Globally, societies need an updated caregiving model. As a country, we see a family problem and a healthcare issue. Younger, healthy, working family members expect to step up and care for older relatives. The healthcare system should provide medical care, and we expect it covers everything, but it doesn’t.

Employers face an employment crisis as most (55% to 70%) of every workforce are caring for aging family. The shifts now impact a critical mass of society, disproportionately affecting women and minorities.

Traditionally, a family member (usually a woman) managed household responsibilities, including care for children, aging relatives, and family members with a disability. In the latter half of the 20th century, women began to move out of the home and into the workforce. This created the beginnings of the caregiving evolution.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9ZQ3yALPhU&ab_channel=CareWiseSolutions

Healthcare has not kept pace with mounting demands from aging baby boomers, dependent adults, and veterans with long-term disabilities.

Business leaders are uninformed.

Family structures fracture.

Those needing care are isolated with inadequate services.

Employers and employees experience massive losses.

The 7.2m unfilled homecare jobs exacerbate the reliance on families to provide healthcare assistance. Every workforce is redeployed to fill care jobs. Employers lose economic and human resources.

Traditional leaders maintaining embedded ideologies drive current national care efforts, mostly caregiving-centric non-profits, private insurance providers, family care foundations, and corporate benefits professionals.

Overburdened caregivers cannot work. Employees find their health, job, careers, and family commitments impacted beyond the breaking point. Employers only retain a sustainable workforce with a changed care system.

Without professional home care staff, employees rely on leaves of absence and time off instead of positively contributing to the organization’s success and building a career balanced with a beneficial role supporting family.

The care gap between initial family care responsibilities and when loved ones become a full-time patient is currently underfunded and lacks infrastructure, with a desparate impact on BIPOC and women. This care gap drives employees out of the workforce long-term, without reemployment prospects.

A model is needed to address:

• Shared vision and values for the way we work, live and care.
• Visible cross-industry commitment to transformation.
• Acceleration of labor alignment, workforce stability, staffing care-at-home jobs.
• Transition Plans installing Centers of Excellence and job creation for skilled care employees.
• Beta testing CareWise Solutions partnering with diverse innovators of family care products, services, and technology.
• Workforce development efforts preparing care professionals to relieve employed family from home healthcare.
• Communications, education, and solutions, especially through employers, to reduce overwhelming burdens of informal caregivers.
• Coordinated information and data management.

Today, 69 million people are informal caregivers, 70 million more baby boomers are aging, and 7.2 million open jobs in skilled care in the home are unfilled.

A paradigm shift is required to fundamentally change the caregiver culture. Preserving Employment is a national risk.  

Addressing employer needs to build a sustainable, high-performing work and caring business environment. Supporting employee interest in reducing care-related stress, job and income continuity, a balanced work and life climate, and continuing opportunities for the career growth of everyone.

Enterprise Development for a High-Performance, Caring Business Environment requires transitioning from crisis to confidence to maintain careers, relationships, continuous learning, and good health. As an enterprise program, leaders initiate and create performance expectations for integrating care into mainstream business operations.

Caregiving Workforce Transitions directly support employed caregivers at any level of the organization on their caregiving journey. For stressed, overwhelmed, and overworked caregivers tired of being told to meditate and take time off work.

The Caring Place HUB online dashboard includes access to proprietary and curated resources for Employee-Caregivers and their families. The resources help keep employees on the job and build confidence that care support is adequately performed at home.

Access to staffing, skilled care facilities, government agencies and professional sites, home care resources, and custom products, such as safety sensors, prescription discounts and more, are available in the curated marketplace.

A self-paced Employee Orientation is for everyone at all levels of the organization. The orientation helps clarify the workforce issues, as half of the team has family caregiving responsibilities. Participants examine how the care crisis impacts their organization, colleagues, and themselves.

Caregivers often get passed over for promotions, throwing off years or decades of career progress. Career Protection offers online sessions for concrete answers and insights into -

• •Managing care in less time
• •Improving the care your loved one receives
• •Setting boundaries with healthcare professionals
• •Protecting your career and career identity

Group coaching sessions to identify the caregiver beliefs of team members and show how the beliefs shape the team’s “hidden” workforce culture. Employers who understand the shifts in the work and care environments know they are not solving employee benefits problems.

Team Leader training in communications, engagement, coaching skills, and adapting team leader roles to the new workforce reality.

Managing the Future of Work helps corporate leaders join hands in creating a culture of health, high productivity, and great respect for employees’ Career and Care needs solve the right problem – Transformation!

Internal Communications & Public Relations Teams require education and ongoing content to manage the increasing demand for accurate information for caregivers and their employers.

These same principles and solutions improve the attraction and retention of the care workforce, minimize the dissatisfaction of current staff, enrich job roles, and increase the dignity of work and team relationships. This program is designed to improve the care workforce shortage, dissatisfaction of current staff, and the inability to hire the 7.2 million more care employees required.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNQxbDMjTVE&t=4s&ab_channel=CareWiseSolutions

The caregiving crisis is based on a lack of clarity and definition of roles in the healthcare-to-home system. The shortage of skilled workers and high turnover in professional roles to support fragile health is tied to job design and career opportunities, leading to a lack of respect and dignity. This results in a lower quality of life for aging and people with disabilities in the home and in skilled nursing facilities.

Physicians and healthcare retail delivery systems (CVS and Walmart) are handing over nursing responsibilities to family members without delegation of care. The family caregivers do not have the skills to perform quality care and no method to measure patient outcomes. The assumption is that there is a capable and available family caregiver to support fragile health in every home.

Our solution draws the boundaries between services provided by the healthcare system and what must be performed at home. For family boundaries to be respected, healthcare must build organization capacity. 

Our system services employers to boldly push back unacceptable assumptions that employees be forced into a (family nursing) career that was not in their plan. We also equip employers with the tools to understand and respond to unfair expectations that impact employee health, income, family structures, community position, and career.

Our system supports the development of the 7.2 million required workers and job creation to reduce the instance of fragile health in the community. Employee caregivers are experiencing extreme mental health and stress related disabilities as they try to fit two jobs into 24 hours in a day without a support system, skills or resources.   

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTZNnLTaqCQ&ab_channel=CareWiseSolutions

Caregiving Workforce Transitions will allow employers overseeing those with family caregiving responsibilities and their ability to manage the burdens being placed on them resulting in issues such as –

Stress and Burnout – Caregivers’ physical and mental health worsens over an average of 5 ½ years of caring for a loved one. Being on-call all the time for those with chronic conditions causes the most emotional stress. Guilt about not providing adequate care to loved ones.                                      

Reduced Productivity - Something has to give when you feel torn between your career and providing the best care. Stress over what’s happening at home can make you sick, too.

Absenteeism – As a family caregiver, some time off is inevitable, but everyone needs to minimize their time away.

Team Spillover – About half of the team has caregiving responsibilities. Coping with these dual roles, the effects spill over onto the entire workforce. Resentment and isolation build as the rest pick up the slack for more stigma and more mental health issues.

Time Management – As a caregiver, you have less time for your career, yourself, and other family members. You sacrifice things you enjoy. Trouble balancing work with care responsibilities may mean missing opportunities.

Career Identity – Many employees built a reputation and invested in career growth. Suddenly, caregiving changes their ability to live up to their expectations of themselves and that others have of them.

Steeped in 25 years of transformational leadership in a global, Fortune 50 corporation, Jeannette offers alternative paths to the current economic, human capital and digital ecosystem employee caregiving models for work and care across America.

Jeannette introduces and builds on several themes that focus on improving the human caregiver experience and building “longevity-of-care” solutions. These achieve many outcomes, including support for the employee-caregiver job of choice retention and assistance for employers to build and sustain a viable workforce to reach its engagement and productivity goals. This is achieved as employee-caregivers are enabled by a seamless, national caregiver system with shared values, policies, labor, insurance, healthcare, community services, and public health operations… all operating in a coordinated, collaborative ecosystem of care.

Jeannette has been a thought leader and solutions provider during some of the most challenging times as the Bell System was experiencing a 10-year deregulation and reinvention era. She advanced to head of the organization and people strategies for AT&T. As the senior executive for technical staff development, her work included consulting with Singapore to build a technical university. She led ten medical centers providing employee health and wellness services.

She was a regular spokesperson on organization transformation to the Wall Street Journal Fast Company magazine and Sunday morning business shows, recognized by thousands of media outlets. She is the author of The Global Caregiving Gold Rush and Stories for Leadership Insights.

Jeannette has been building a network of support. CareWise Solutions is introducing the CareWise model in insurance, skilled care, and healthcare institutions. We have input from employees and existing care workers in the home and those serving support roles to families in the home. We have been presenters at the Internet of Things (IoT) Revolution conference, presented and participated in Rutgers’s Business School Institute for Social Innovation, and taught over 1000 international students about the wellness, work and care challenges in their United Nations Sustainable Goal Development Effort.

Jeannette is conducting CareWise Seminars and forming partnerships across private employers in all related industries. We have relationships and hold memberships with caregiving professional associations. 

Jeannette is also the mom of two daughters with developmental disabilities and shared aging care roles with her sisters.

CareWise Solutions has convened a global team bringing innovative solutions in a new marketplace- a work-life and caring ecosystem. CareWise Solutions for employers and employee-caregivers is our specialty. We are involved with the entire care system. Our CareWise partners work hand-in-glove in skilled facilities, building operational solutions for the nursing team, residents, and families.

We are a modest entrepreneurial group living and working in the United States, South America, Ukraine, India, Egypt, Pakistan, Australia, the Philippines, and the UK. Most team members bring personal experience in the dual role of being a caregiver and earning a living. That definitely increases our sensitivity and makes our words much more than talk. We know that you need solutions! 

CareWise Solutions Caregiving Workforce Transitions has an operational Caring Place HUB dashboard. It provides significant value and, with support, can discover the greater support required across the industries and professions involved in the emerging wellness, work, and care industry.

We work with skilled care businesses and employers to integrate the Caregiving Workforce Transitions, supporting the attraction and retention of care professionals and employee caregivers. The online Caring Place Hub is open for staffing, technology, family lifecycle, financial, legal planning consulting, and care and career coaching. We offer 18 employee, employer and family education programs participating in the development of a Caregiving Support Network.

The Caring Place HUB dashboard includes proprietary and curated resources for Employers, Employee-Caregivers, and families. The Caring Place Model provides easily implementable solutions to introduce the principles and practicalities of employment in a care-intensive society while employees strive to manage the best care possible for their aging family members.

We plan to expand the curriculum with multi-media, on-premise, and online educational programming. We envision in the long term that different segments of the wellness, work and care industry will take this work in many new directions. Right now, we are the only provider of this model.

Our public education efforts through the non-profit arm of CareWise Solutions regularly reaches in excess of 50,000 per month by email.

Small tests continue. We are in an extensive prequalification process, regularly talking to business leaders about the workforce transition need. Our educational efforts have included decision-makers in the benefits, insurance, HR, and technology industries. 

Jeannette makes presentations to local business organizations. CareWise Solutions has been endorsed by a prominent physician in the Atlantic Healthcare system. Jeannette has been acknowledged by the Women in the Cloud (Microsoft) organization. 

1. We are applying for grants to build better solutions to remediate the effects of fragile health in the healthcare system on employment in our nation. The disparate impact on the needs of People of Color must be prioritized as a social determinant of health. People in marginalized communities and low-wage jobs are being forced out of their jobs because they are challenged with more hours of caregiving work in the home.
2. We are applying to Solve to conduct a beta-testing of the Caring Place HUB, combined with the Leadership Launch Initiative, executive education, and Workforce Transformation Process. The goal is to build the Caring Place HUB model into a commercial model with scale. A Caring Place Hub powered by leading-edge technology and private sector market leaders can have a high impact while participating in the delivery of a complex ecosystem requisite.
3. We need high-level partnerships. This immense industrial project has a structured platform and shared decision-making approach. Ownership and funding can expand the effort, improve the quality of life, and care for those we love.
4. We request funds to develop accompanying educational materials to guide those at the highest levels in organizations. When these professionals take on a family caregiving role, they impact our economy significantly. 

We have tackled a massive problem and consolidated the competing forces in an approach that business leaders should gravitate to. President Biden, chief executives, managers, employee-caregivers and healthcare professionals have all confirmed the need for a new homecare model. Those familiar with the Workforce Transformation Process from CareWise Solutions support this strategic direction as a foundation for healthcare-to-home transitional solutions. 

Our innovative solution is a strategy based on a blend of transformational business leadership skills applied to an emerging (worldwide) care economy, with wisdom to identify the root cause of the problem and the courage to step into conversations that others dare not discover.

Workforce Transformation Process is a smart approach to overcoming barriers to change. CareWise Solutions addresses the unmanaged problem of human beings classified as “the backbone of healthcare delivery in the United States,” contributing billions of dollars in unpaid time. Currently, 53 million unpaid caregivers are unmanaged, yet exceed the employee population of the top 20 largest corporations in the United States.

This human resource is already employed in their own careers, with little support from the care industry. The burden of non-institutional care remains on the backs of families, employers, and employees. Our nation cannot sustain a viable workforce if 50% of its employees are (silently) working in the care industry.

Caregiving Workforce Transitions and the Caring Place HUB System are innovative because it is a vision, employment and technology strategy, content, and provider partnerships to change the way care at home is performed. This provides the foundation to educate, communicate, and improve activities of daily living for families.

Focused on enhanced care performance in the home and relieving employee-caregiver burdens, this system will, over time, improve the performance of almost 53 million people who are providing “informal care” to family.

Communications between and across varied participants will be based on a common language – not myths of a bygone era.

No current infrastructure or overarching ecosystem exists to bring together the answers and those asking the questions. The Caregiving Workforce Transitions, when taken to scale, is an innovative solution to provide the foundation for this infrastructure.

One year – Acceptance of the changed caregiving workforce model and need for transition from the current societal expectations. Increased acceptance from employers that they have a role in preserving the stability of the American workforce. Completion of the Beta testing for the Caregiving Workforce Transitions. 

Five Years – Within five years, we aim to develop a national, scaled model of the Caregiving Workforce Transitions and Caring Place HUB, with tens of thousands of services represented for millions of caregivers to access quickly and easily. The family care system is currently complex and frustrating to try to navigate. With targeted education and direct access to vetted, verified resources, caregivers can spend more time caring ABOUT family members and less time caring FOR them.

One year –

• Collaborative effort with 50% more vetted, appropriate partners to anticipate and manage the quality of life for carees.
• 10% acceptance by employers, service providers, and government agencies that the caregiving workforce model is transitioning from the current societal expectations to a managed homecare delivery system.
• 20% reduction in the turnover in skilled care facilities.
• 5% recoup of care-related wastes in organizations choosing to implement Caregiving Workforce Transitions.
• 2% reduction in the extra healthcare costs of caregivers.
• Average increase of 18 months for each Baby Boomer to age in place.
• Completion of the Beta testing for the Caregiving Workforce Transitions demonstrating a measurable increase in confidence to work and care for family members.

Five Years – Within five years, we aim to develop a national, scaled model of the Caregiving Workforce Transitions and Caring Place HUB, with tens of thousands of services represented for millions of caregivers to access quickly and easily. The family care system is currently complex and frustrating to try to navigate. With targeted education and direct access to vetted, verified resources, caregivers can spend more time caring ABOUT family members and less time caring FOR them.

Within five years, we aim to develop an international employment brand for American organizations with international operations. 

The Caregiving Workforce Transitions model has the potential, at scale, to provide the foundation for transformational change in the care industry. With resources at their fingertips, and the ability to communicate directly, family members, employees, corporations, care industry workers, and others can build the overarching ecosystem required for people to work and care more naturally. 

This is an engagement model shifting responsibility from the employee to responsible institutions, such as employers. 

Our theory of change is essentially disruptive. Baby Boomers are aging and creating vast changes in our society. The underlying assumptions about how families operate are undermining how our economic growth can continue. Our society must shift the core belief that a family is solely responsible to serve aging family members in a longevity society when the majority of their children already have jobs and their own family responsibilities. 

We are in a revolutionary period of change, not an era of fixing what's broken or simply continuous learning. The system has to be disrupted with a significant transition plan to invite what works from the old system and leave what doesn't work behind. 

Healthcare advances through artificial intelligence, the introduction of new consumer products, and enterprise infrastructure need to be brought together for the new home and community-based care system. 

Our goal is to bring these separate information and operational technology types together to serve families, caregivers, and employers using a central HUB. 

A caregiving and workforce strategy has to drive an aligned technology strategy enabling new outcomes in the lives and care of people. 

CareWise™ Solutions is committed to diversity, inclusion, and equity. While we are a modest team of freelancers who are virtual and represent 7 countries from the United States, South America, Ukraine, Central Asia, and the Pacific Rim, we care about our shared values. They make us a successful team.

We respect and value diverse life experiences and heritages and ensure that all voices are valued and heard. We make sure that cross-cultural beliefs are respected in language and actions. We listen to everyone who joins our community and try to accommodate all suggestions.

The CareWise™ Solutions operating policy demonstrates our values in how we work and in our daily business relationships. This commitment is demonstrated in very practical ways, such as representing diversity of gender, race, ethnicity, national origin, age, sexual orientation or identity, education, or disability in all of our products and services, such as coursework and training materials on our website. We represent our values in our media publications and conversations.

Jeannette’s daughters are ethnic minorities, and her immediate relatives are multiracial. We represent the interests of people with disabilities, women, and minorities (People of Color) in every presentation and product. It is in our DNA.

As we grow, we believe our core commitments to diversity, inclusion and equity will inspire customer loyalty and motivate other businesses to do the same.

Enterprise sales (B2B) 

Sustained donations and grants, selling products and consulting services, and facilitated virtual and in-person events.

10% donations

10% book sales

20% enterprise subscriptions 

20% educational sales

30% consumer employee caregiver solutions

10% certification of educational providers