Expert Warns Employers Cannot Currently Achieve New Carer Blueprint

Health and social care expert, Irene Watkins, founder and CEO of Carers Cloud, has welcomed the ethos of the recent Carers Week publication, “Building Carer Friendly Communities: a blueprint,” but warns that employers typically lack the means to implement its vision. 

Operating in limbo over the carer issue, without access to the right carer programme, will increasingly expose businesses, and the British economy, to risk, she adds.

The Carers Week blueprint’s vision focuses on creating environments in which opportunities and help is delivered to carers.  In the carer-friendly community, the vital role of unpaid carers gains recognition.  Employers also proactively identify and support carers and carers themselves are able to self-identify as such.

Irene Watkins believes the UK is a long way away from achieving this vision.  Firstly, employers do not have the means or culture to provide the support carers need.  Secondly, they struggle to identify carers, because people delivering unpaid care typically fail to attach a ‘carer’ label to themselves.  Many fail to equate the demonstration of love and concern for a parent, child, relative, partner, neighbour or friend, with being a ‘carer’.  

The lack of visibility of ‘plain clothes carers’, as Irene Watkins describes them, led her to  leverage decades of expertise in this sector to found her company, Carers Cloud, and devise on-point and informed solutions.

“Carers are everywhere we look, but we typically fail to notice them, because they are shrouded in a nebula,” she says.  “They do not have a voice, because they do not describe themselves as carers.  Consequently, they are not heard by employers and this creates a huge operational risk at the heart of many businesses.

“Thousands of carers exist in the ‘cloud’, moving between work duties and caring responsibilities, without often vocalising their schedule, stresses and worries.  Carers Cloud is committed to bringing the winds of change to this situation, in a dynamic way, to blow the clouds away and tackle the issue from both sides – that of the employer and that of the carer.”

Irene Watkins (RGN, CIPD Chartered Fellow, MBA), is no stranger to taking on seemingly impossible challenges. During her career she completely turned around a CQC-rated hospice from 'Requires Improvement' to 'Outstanding' in 4.5 years, despite this being during the Covid pandemic.  Other career highlights have been opening the first Carers Centre in Cardiff and leading Macmillan Cancer Support's NHS partnership programme for South West Wales.

The solutions she is now bringing to UK workplaces are vital to the future success of British business.  Currently, over 5000 people in paid employment become unpaid carers each day.[1]  That is 1.9 million workers a year.  One-in-seven people in the UK workforce is a carer.[2]  Many of these are the ‘plain clothes carers’ nobody sees.  The unpaid carer situation costs the UK £8.2 billion a year in absence, staff turnover and stress, according to Carers UK.[3]  With an ageing population, these figures will only worsen, unless an effective strategy is implemented by employers.

Finding the solution to this massive issue has been Irene Watkins’ focus for several years. She has now developed a programme that allows employers to calculate their carer risk score, plan for the future of employees’ ageing relatives and map employees’ caring journeys.  In so doing, attrition, presenteeism and absence are all placed under better control.

Carers Cloud’s culture-led approach also allows employers to gain full compliance with the Carers Leave Act 2024.  It trains managers and leaders in how to approach the carer agenda and create communication and conversations around care.  In this way, it reduces the likelihood of tribunals and allegations of discrimination.

It also fully empowers employers and allows them to get ahead, by giving them the means to not just measure the carer risk to their KPIs, but also identify where their risk is concentrated within the workforce. 

“Whilst the Carers Week blueprint makes all the right points, employers simply do not have the means to do much more than pay lip-service to the principles contained within it,”, says Irene.  “Only large organisations can usually afford to sign up to the current carer-friendly accreditation scheme for England and Wales and, even then, probably lack truly effective strategies to really take their carer programme to the optimal level.

“Carers Cloud arms them with a positive way to identify carers within their workforce nebula.  With our help, they can then work on personalised roadmaps for those employees and tackle the risks that not correctly handling carers’ needs presents.  Unless employers have this tailored insight, plus the tools to address their risk, little will change and the threat to UK business performance will become even more significant as the workforce demographic ages.”

​Employers wishing to benefit from the Carers Cloud programme of support and cultural change, can contact Irene Watkins on Irene@carerscloud.com

[1] https://www.employersforcarers.org/resources/facts-and-figures/

[2] https://www.carersuk.org/media/iczezr1u/are-you-ready_web.pdf

[3] https://www.carersuk.org/press-releases/employers-commitment-to-supporting-unpaid-carers-at-work-gathers-pace/

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Editors notes

Powered by a proprietary identification framework and evidence-based resilience methodology, Carers Cloud proactively identifies hidden family carers within organisations and maps their full caring journey, providing personalised roadmaps to support employees at every stage. In this way, it allows employers to reduce the significant risks to the business that unidentified carers present, which include lost productivity, the loss of skills that occurs due to employee attrition, absenteeism and presenteeism, as well as legal exposures. Under the direction of caring and health sector expert, Irene Watkins, Carers Cloud is introducing groundbreaking approaches to this major issue for British business.