Informal caregivers, employment and grief

In Ireland, 1 in 9 employees will be providing unpaid care in the home to a family member who may have additional needs through disability, mental health, ageing, illness and addiction (Family Carers Ireland, 2020).

Over half of these carers are in paid employment (Lafferty et al. 2022). Informal carers will be juggling their work life with their caring life, which may go unnoticed to their peers.

With an ageing population, demand for care is going to increase, so it’s important to look at how this impacts the workforce (FCI 2017).

The work that carers do in the home is first and foremost of value to the person they care for, but also to our economy and society in general and should be valued within the working environment.

Carers often demonstrate strong skills in resilience, empathy, multitasking, communication, and advocacy, which are widely sought after skills within the workplace (Acquired Brain Injury Ireland, 2024). Recruiting and retaining carers has great value to any organisation and their business.

Furthermore, by creating supportive work environments for employees with care duties, you’ll be more likely to retain good talent and keep people employed. This has benefits to the organisation but also to the economy.

Not to mention, paid employment can also be a protective factor for carers and their wellbeing – keeping them socially connected with healthy distractions by having breaks away from caring duties (Lafferty et al. 2022). It also helps carers to retain their identity outside their caring role (FCI 2017), a very important factor in keeping carers well.

What does caring have to do with grief?

While we know that people grieve after the death of someone, grief for carers can come in many forms with many carers living with ongoing loss.

Living with loss requires constant adjustment to change, and carers will be continuously trying to do this while working (Harris 2020).

Here are some examples of loss and the ensuing grief a carer can experience because of these losses:

• Watching your loved one change physically, mentally and/or cognitively as an illness progresses.
• Seeing your loved one miss out on life or not having the future you expected for them.
• Losing your own freedom as a carer and hopes and dreams for your own future (e.g., change of job, loss of social life and hobbies).
• Loss of financial security and loss of support (be it social or more formal support).

Remember, there may be different circumstances in which your employees could be providing care. They may be providing long-term care, with ongoing loss, but they may also be providing care to a family member who is sick and dying. This means that the employee may also be experiencing fear and grief while watching the person they care for deteriorate and know what is ahead for them. This can be overwhelming. Carers can also be juggling so many things between work and family life, they can feel additional strain and a depletion of resources (Lafferty et al. 2022). FCI define this as the ‘juggle struggle’ (FCI 2020).

How can employers help carers who may be experiencing grief?

By taking some of these simple steps within the workplace, employers can support employees who may be experiencing grief because of their caring duties:

• As with any grieving employee, acknowledgement of the strain and stress they may be under is an important first step.
• Regular meetings provide an opportunity to check in with your employee around their wellbeing but also to ensure they are getting on okay at work and at home and if there are any challenges they are experiencing. Through the nature of caring, different transitions can bring different hardships (e.g., diagnosis or movement into a care home), so having open honest discussions with your employee can help you help them.
• Putting in place some accommodations or supportive steps that could make a big difference to your employee, such as flexible working and/or working from home so they can juggle both their work and care duties effectively.
• Embedding an inclusive culture into your workplace that acknowledges all types of family care situations (and not just the obvious ones) helps show family carers that they are seen and valued. Just because an employee has no children, this does not mean they have no care duties, and it is important that all employees are aware of this. A healthy and inclusive workplace culture can have positive impacts on employee wellbeing, and this is no different for a carer.
• Build the skills and capacity of your workforce to understand what grieving looks like so that employees can identify this in themselves (in particular, when they are anticipating a loss and may not see themselves as grieving yet) and also so they can identify this and support others going through it.
• Build resilience in your carer employees where possible by highlighting their strengths and contribution to the workplace and encouraging them to show self-compassion given all they are dealing with.
• Ensure you have policies in place that matter to carer employees, such as a Work-Life Balance Policy, A Carer’s Policy, The Right to Disconnect Policy and also a Bereavement Policy.

Finally, remember that none of us know when we may be required to provide regular informal care to a family member or friend. Treat your employees how you would like to be treated in those circumstances, and trust that if you show your employees ‘trust’ they are much more likely to feel valued and work more effectively.

The great work carers do for our society should be acknowledged, validated and supported in all settings.

By Amy Gibney , National Grief in the Workplace Coordinator, Irish Hospice Foundation

References

• Acquired Brain Injury Ireland: Employer's Webinar: The Carer's Contribution 2024, 10th April 2024
• Family Carer’s Ireland (2017) Briefing paper: balancing work and care, international challenges and Irish perspectives. Available at https://familycarers.ie/media/1757/working-carers-briefing-paper-corrected.pdf
• Family Carers Ireland (2020) Caring employers. Available at https://familycarers.ie/carer-supports/caring-employers#:~:text=There%20are%20500%2C000%2B%20family%20carers,caring%20role%20in%20the%20home
• Harris, D, L. (2020) Non death loss and grief: context and clinical implications. New York: Routeledge
• Lafferty, A., Phillips, D., ?Dowling-Hetherington, L., Fahy, M., Moloney, B., Duffy, C., Clare? Paul, G., Fealy, G., and Kroll, T . (2022) Colliding worlds: family carers’ experiences of balancing work and care in Ireland during the COVID 19 pandemic. Health Soc Community, 30(3), pp. 1133-11421. Available at: https://researchrepository.ucd.ie/server/api/core/bitstreams/3ab38b5d-bbcc-4460-ba63-f86a24677525/content
• Lafferty, A., Phillips, D., Fealy, G., Paul, G., Duffy, C., Dowling-Hetherington, L., … Kroll, T. (2023). Making it work: a qualitative study of the work-care reconciliation strategies adopted by family carers in Ireland to sustain their caring role. Community, Work & Family, 26(3), 292–311. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13668803.2022.2043826