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What a correction taught us about caregiving and work

Writer: Mark Fukae
Mark Fukae
6 days ago
2 min read

A bright teal digital campaign graphic for Professionals Who Care featuring a large yellow circular title frame on the right that reads "What a correction taught us about caregiving and work". In the upper left, a tilted square inset photograph shows a living room setting with a light beige armchair and a silver metal folding walker on a hardwood floor. In the lower left, white text presents the quote: "Paid leave is proven. Flexibility keeps workers. Whether flexibility keeps care arrangements intact is a question nobody has answered." framed by large lime-green quotation marks. The circular white Professionals Who Care logo is anchored in the bottom right corner.
Good advocacy requires policy built on evidence, not assumptions. This week, we are resetting our analytical baseline and launching The Research Desk to focus on the unmapped intersection of workplace policy and home care outcomes.

By Mark Fukae - Director of Advocacy - Professionals Who Care


Advocacy runs on numbers, and this month I had to retire some of mine.


For most of 2026, I cited a figure of $33,614 as the yearly cost difference between nursing facility care and home-based care in Colorado. When I went to give the Colorado Commission on Medicaid a citation for it, I couldn't find one. The Department of Health Care Policy and Financing's own 2023 report on people who moved from nursing facilities to home care shows a difference of about $40,712 per person per year. That figure describes one group making one kind of transition, and I'll carry that limit whenever I use it. Projections I built on the old number are withdrawn, and the full list of corrections is published.


Checking my figures sent me back through the research, and what I found matters for every professional who is also caring for someone at home.


Some things are well established. Caregiving more than about ten hours a week pulls people out of work, especially women. Family care keeps older adults out of nursing homes. Paid family leave in California reduced the share of older adults living in nursing homes by about 11 percent. And a randomized trial published in Nature in 2024 found that letting employees work from home two days a week cut quit rates by a third, with no effect on performance reviews.


What I couldn't find is any study that connects those pieces for caregivers: whether flexibility at work keeps a caregiver's arrangement at home from falling apart. Colorado's largest health survey asks working Coloradans what kind of job they have and how many hours they work. I haven't found a state data source that asks employed caregivers whether their jobs bend, or what happens at home when they don't.


That question is now the focus of my research, through a new series called The Research Desk. The proposed FLEX Act would give employed caregivers a way to ask for flexibility and receive a written answer, and would begin measuring whether that conversation makes a difference.


For the professionals in our community, two requests. If you're working and caregiving in Colorado, take the Caring Costs Survey at casiadvocacy.org/research. And if your workplace has made flexibility work for someone, or couldn't, that story is exactly the evidence that doesn't exist yet.


 
 
 

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