Patricia and Pat Guadagno were terrified about the prospect of his ailing father going home.

The 86-year-old widower had spent weeks in a hospital rehabilitation unit after breaking his hip in a fall. Mostly confined to a wheelchair, he seemed weak and confused to his family. Yet he was adamant he would be fine in his own apartment.

For help, Patricia turned to her employer, Prudential Financial Inc. The company helped cover the cost of a geriatric social worker who visited the man, evaluated his needs and helped persuade him to move to an assisted-care facility.

"She moved mountains," Patricia, a nurse at a Prudential Financial office in Pennsylvania, said of the case worker. "It really made the situation so much easier."

Prudential Financial is one of a small but growing number of employers starting to provide eldercare benefits for employees.

Recognizing the mounting burden of caring for aging parents, companies including NBC Universal, Unilever USA and McGraw-Hill Cos. offer services that include underwriting the cost of emergency caregivers and connecting employees with nursing-home finders or physicians who specialize in older patients.

Some employers are allowing workers to include their elderly parents in health insurance coverage. Some provide counseling, group support sessions, more flexible work schedules and even help with errands and home repairs.

Marc Solomon said his bosses helped ease his eldercare worries by providing a room where he and co-workers meet monthly over lunch to talk about the stresses of caring for parents. A software administrator for Toyota Motor Sales USA in Torrance, Calif., Solomon, 60, often came in early and left late to keep up with his duties while overseeing the care of his ailing father, who suffered from dementia. He died in 2005.

But the balancing act took a toll. "You don't at first notice the stress you're under," he recalled. "But every time the phone rings, you think it's the call when they'll tell you he's dead. Sometimes you're hoping that's the call you get, because you want to get back to the life you had."

The elder support group is one of three that Toyota makes available to employees. The company covers the cost of an outside facilitator.

Although little data are available on the number of companies offering these benefits, consultants say eldercare assistance is catching on faster than did childcare.

Many executives at these employers, typically men, initially saw childcare as primarily a benefit for female workers. Eldercare, on the other hand, is seen as a burden for both men and women, said Ellen Galinsky, president of the New York-based Families and Work Institute.

"Not everyone has children, but everyone has a parent," said Alexandra McCauley, a human resources vice president at NBC Universal in New York.

Of course, adult children always have cared for ill family members. But a confluence of demographic trends has turned that responsibility into a major worry.

Most of the adult children who look after their parents are still working — 60 percent, according to one survey — and they plan to stay on the job.

Meanwhile, the number of Americans who are 65 and older is expected to double to 71 million by 2030. Nearly every baby boomer still living will be included in that pool. The population of so-called superseniors, those 85 and older, also is expected to nearly double by that time to 9.6 million.

Employee absences and turnover tied to eldercare already cost American employers as much as $33 billion a year, according to the study by MetLife, the research arm of Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. At least six of 10 working caregivers found the work-parent pinch so consuming that they reduced their hours, took unpaid leave or made another change in their employment, the study showed.

Employers traditionally tried to deal with eldercare issues by offering group rates on long-term-care insurance policies that paid for a nurse or housekeeper. The expansion into other eldercare services comes when businesses are trimming or eliminating other benefits, such as health insurance.

But eldercare benefits cost relatively little compared with health coverage, for example. Employers generally provide some services at no cost, such as consultation with lawyers, and subsidize others, such as in-home nursing care. Employees might be required to foot co-payments.

At Prudential, for instance, employees can have a lawyer prepare simple wills for their parents at no charge and pay discounted rates for drafting other documents.

"We view (eldercare benefits) as a differentiator, a way of attracting and retaining our employees," NBC Universal's McCauley said. Employees at the entertainment company can tap into a referral service to connect their parents with caregivers and other aid, and the company is testing a backup care program in Florida.

Many top executives understand the need for eldercare because "they themselves may be responsible for an older relative," said David Lissy, chief executive of Bright Horizons Family Solutions, a provider of employer-sponsored childcare centers and backup baby-sitters that this year began offering backup eldercare.

More than 20 employers — including asset management firms Blackrock Financial and AllianceBernstein — signed up with Bright Horizons within months. Close to 100 other employers will begin offering eldercare services to their workers in January.

Costs for the child and elder backup care package typically range from $20,000 for a small business to $1 million for a company with thousands of employees.

Lissy, 41, is struggling with his father-in-law's Alzheimer's disease, a predicament that inspired him to extend his company's business into eldercare.

Backup care helped Jean Everett over a rough patch last summer. Everett, a financial clerk for Atlanta-based law firm Alston & Bird, says her mother suffers from Alzheimer's and lives with a nephew in Alabama. A nurse sees to the 83-year-old's needs during the day, but when a new job required the nephew to work nights and weekends, the nurse couldn't shift her hours. Everett faced the prospect of draining her mother's modest savings to pay for a fill-in caretaker.

The backup sitter provided by the law firm saved the clerk from having to use her vacation time to do the job. "I don't have that much time off," Everett said, adding that the backup benefit "came right on time for me."