Healthcare

Retention

Caring for our clinicians: The impact of double duty caregiving

They may forget your name, but they will never forget how you made them feel. 

- Maya Angelou

 

Healthcare clinicians are passionate about helping others, making a difference in people's lives and contributing to the greater good of society.

However, this passion often carries over into physicians’, nurses’, and healthcare professionals’ personal lives too. They may be caring for their children or an aging parent — or both — and are usually the ones friends and family turn to for care advice. Many clinicians are pulling double duty (caring for dependent children or adult relatives) or even triple duty (caring for dependent children & adult relatives) as caregivers without even realizing it.

Unfortunately, this can-do attitude and insatiable desire to take care of loved ones often results in clinicians neglecting their own needs, which can lead to various issues, such as:

  • Compassion fatigue
  • Poor job performance
  • Emotional exhaustion
  • Workplace injuries and more

In addition to these issues, caregivers can also experience psychological distress. In one study, it was reported 70% of all caregivers suffer at least one mental health symptom in the form of anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, and more. 

 

According to a study conducted by Archangels and Henry Ford Health System, double duty caregivers were1.5x to 2x more likely to score in the high caregiver intensity range.

Caring For Clinicians (Why it’s a win-win)

Being a double or triple duty caregiver is nothing new for clinicians. However, the combination of juggling higher caseloads due to COVID, cost of living increases, dealing with school closures, and caregiving responsibilities outside of work have pushed hospital staff to the brink.   

For the last two years, we’ve been watching the plight of our superheroes in scrubs from afar, and we value your sacrifices. Now we want to return the favor and be a rock in your time of need.  

We understand caregiving for a disabled child, sick spouse, or aging parent can be a stressful, beautiful, lonely and rewarding journey all at the same time.  

We know because 90% of Wellthy’s team members have their own personal experiences with caregiving. My personal story is caregiving for my wife and our young twins as she courageously battled stage IV breast cancer for 11 months before leaving us much too early.  I choose to work at Wellthy to help others that feel alone and helpless while tirelessly caring for a loved one.   

This is why Wellthy is announcing we are expanding our services into the healthcare sector. Together, we can help empower healthcare organizations to provide clinicians with the much-needed caregiving support they need while also boosting employee productivity and retention.

Currently, we partner with 120 employer clients (24 of which are Fortune 500 companies), including Salesforce, Hearst, Facebook, Voya, Cisco, Prudential, and many others. Some of the benefits employees and employers have seen using Wellthy include:

  • 90% of employees reported feeling more engaged/less stressed at work
  • 33% of employees said Wellthy’s support prevented them from taking a leave of absence or resigning 
  • 55% of employees recouped more than 10 hours working with Wellthy, with 17% reporting 40-plus hours saved

We’ll be with you every step of the way to develop a partnership and implementation plan perfectly tailored to the specific needs of your healthcare organization. We’ll also leverage the expertise we’ve developed over the years to get your clinicians engaged and onboarded.  

If you’re interested in learning more about how we can partner on caregiving support, reach out to schedule a 30 minute consultation and overview of Wellthy’s solution.


Want to see how Wellthy works? Check out this video that shows how we helped one family navigate complex care for their son.