Will 'A Call A Day' Help the Squeezed Sandwich Generation and the Senior Baby Boomers? 

New program offers 'A Call A Day' across the USA to help those with senior and vulnerable relatives

April 5, 2011--As the post-war baby boom rapidly escalates into the seniors boom, the new middle-aged increasingly face a triangular struggle between helping their adolescent or grown-up offspring, coping with the responsibilities which arrive as their own parents age and meeting the demands of the home and workplace.

With government assistance unlikely to be able to keep pace, the situation is offering considerable opportunities for the private sector to develop further services to both support the aging boomers and to ease the pressure on their families.

One such new venture is Call Concern. This is a start-up which offers "A Call A Day Program" directed mainly at seniors and the infirm. The program operates on a monthly subscription basis.

Subscribers can have their relatives called every day of a year except Sundays and be called in turn if no answer is obtained after three calls in any one day. It is not a medical type service, but brands itself as "the new neighbor next door."

The company seeks to follow in the tradition of old-style neighborliness, when someone could be relied upon to call around each day just to check for an answer, share a few words and confirm that all seems to be okay.

The founder, Maggy Young, derived the idea from the time of the property boom at the turn of the century. She recalls how she purchased a flat which was being sold by a nearby relative of a deceased elderly lady.

She heard from the neighbors how the old lady had apparently been dead for over three months until suspicions were aroused and a forced entry was made. She said, "It always stuck in my mind how sad this all was."

From the memory of that sad flat, Call Concern was born.

She explains, "I read that Guy Kawaski (the venture capitalist and web entrepreneur) said that you should look for a wrong to right, look for a problem to solve and help to answer it. I thought about how the people close to her almost certainly never realized how few callers that old lady locked in her flat sometimes had and wondered if she might have survived if a 'no answer' had been detected earlier ... if she had had any callers of any sort. And this is the social angle to Call Concern: People think neighbors, friends drop by for a chat, but maybe not as frequently as they like to believe."