A major cause of presenteeism is the extent of family ‘caregivers’ in the workplace (recruiter.co.uk, 18 November). Their issues are long term and occur across the spectrum. Therefore, it may be that the 51% productivity of the healthy workers contain a working family caregiver who may be healthy in the clinical sense, but are trying to manage their lives, their work and their family caregiver responsibilities. They don’t leave their care problems at home at 8am to leave for work or wait til 5pm to pick them back up. Better recognition and support for this ever-growing portion of the workplace needs more support than some information and referral EAP programme or two conversations with a social worker or psychologist who never had a day of training in non-clinical family caregiving.

Better support of working family caregivers is a CFO issues as the immense return of productivity from in-place workers is something that goes to the bottom line.

In the US, for example, there is no long-term care system. If family caring is where 90% of chronic care takes place, then we’d better support those workers. Family caregiving is not a ‘disease’ or caused by a poor lifestyle. Family caregiving starts in love, concern or no choice and can become all consuming in every aspect of a persons, family, social and workplace relationships.

It is time we recognised that presenteeism is not just an issue of ‘coming to work with the sick’ but that it represents a significant percentage of workers now and for the foreseeable future, and will not show up on the ‘clinical’ radar until the firebell sounds.

David, caregiverexperts.com