HR technology vendors and benefits providers seeking to address the growing caregiver burden in the workforce may find practical guidance in the approach of dementia educator Dr. Jeannine Forrest, founder of Dementia Coach On-Call®. Forrest, who has spent decades helping families navigate the changing realities of dementia care, emphasizes that frustration builds quickly when a loved one repeats questions or forgets appointments, and that family members often interpret confusion as stubbornness rather than recognizing how cognitive changes shape interactions. For employers and the vendors that serve them, that dynamic matters because caregiving stress does not stay at home; it follows employees into the workplace, affecting focus, attendance, and engagement.
Forrest's central lesson is that correction is rarely the most effective response. Recounting a former art teacher in her early seventies who admired a purple sky and was corrected by her husband that the sky was blue, Forrest asked him a pivotal question: what is more important, for them to be happy, or for you to be right? She advises caregivers to acknowledge and redirect rather than argue, a strategy borrowed from improvisational communication. The safety concern remains addressed without confrontation. For HR vendors, this suggests that caregiver support resources built around coaching and communication skills, rather than purely administrative leave management, may deliver more measurable relief to employees.
Forrest also challenges the tendency to measure dementia by what a person can no longer do. Someone who loved cooking but forgets to turn off the stove might be barred from the kitchen entirely, yet cooking may represent a lifelong passion or a way of expressing love. Instead, she suggests finding safer ways to participate, such as preparing ingredients while someone else supervises the stove, the way bowling with bumper guards changes the environment but lets the person still bowl. A sense of meaning and purpose, she says, is important to uphold when caring for someone living with dementia. Vendors designing caregiver navigation tools could apply the same logic, preserving an employee's sense of competence rather than reducing them to a list of limitations.
Another dimension Forrest highlights is ambiguous loss, a concept developed by researcher Pauline Boss, Ph.D. In dementia care, it describes loving someone who remains physically present while aspects of cognition, personality, or ability to relate are changing. Caregivers can experience genuine grief even while sharing their lives with the person they love, and recognizing those feelings rather than dismissing them helps families adjust. That framing has direct implications for HR: grief and loss in caregiving are not always tied to a discrete event, which means traditional bereavement policies and employee assistance program referrals may miss the chronic, ambiguous nature of caregiver strain.
Forrest reminds caregivers that learning new communication skills takes practice, and that once you know better, you can do better. Her work, including her role as Director of Dementia Horizons Academy at the Dementia Society of America, emphasizes compassionate communication and preserving dignity. As the husband with the purple sky learned, the difference is sometimes surprisingly simple: acknowledging a beautiful moment instead of correcting it. For HR vendors, the competitive opportunity is to translate that insight into training, coaching, and benefits products that treat caregiving as a sustained relationship to be supported, not a compliance box to be checked.
