Emergency childcare
Unforeseen gaps in childcare can pose major organisational challenges for working or studying parents. ETH Zurich has created a service to reduce the organisational and financial burden on parents.
As a university and employer, ETH Zurich enables its members to achieve an appropriate balance between their studies/careers and family responsibilities. ETH Zurich thus offers various services, such as flexible working hours, childcare, events and advice centres. ETH also offers its members various options for extraordinary care shortages:
Care for sick children
When a child is ill, the most important thing is parental care. According to external page Art. 52 of the Personnel Ordinance (PVO-ETH), you are allowed to take up to three days per event as working time for the care of sick persons in your own household or of your own parents, provided that no other care option is available. As a parent or guardian, you are also entitled to take five days of working time per calendar year to deal with important educational matters or attend medical appointments for children under the age of 16. If both parents are employed, they can share the care so that the time off is not only incurred by one parent.
If you have any questions about caring for sick children, please contact the responsible HR partner.
Emergency Care
If both parents’ designated care days and/or flexible working models are not sufficient, then they must be able to organise reliable emergency care quickly. This also applies if their normal childcare is cancelled, if childcare is not covered for an important meeting, or in the event of a work overload. ETH Zurich has created a service for such instances that facilitates access to an emergency care referral service and provides financial support for parents in the event of unforeseen gaps in childcare.
Emergency care is necessary in urgent cases where no other care option (e.g. partner, relatives, acquaintances, etc.) can be organised for the child and the parents cannot be absent from work or lectures. Parents may then take advantage of profawo’s emergency care, which is provided by a person from the emergency nanny pool.
In the event of an unforeseen gap in childcare, parents contact profawo’s referral service directly and independently negotiate the contractual terms and payment for an emergency caregiver. Profawo enters into a contract with the parents, who pay the emergency care costs directly to profawo. The general terms and conditions governing profawo’s emergency nanny placement apply to ETH Zurich members. ETH Zurich accepts no liability for any difficulties arising from the care arrangement.
Profawo charges parents CHF 49 per hour of childcare, plus an additional referral fee of CHF 150 per job regardless of the number of hours. Other costs during the care period (e.g. meals, medication) are settled directly between the parents and the caregiver. Thus, the cost of eight hours of full-day childcare amounts to CHF 542.
ETH Zurich will contribute to the costs of emergency care, up to a maximum amount per child per year. This is based on an eight-hour day, plus the placement fee, at a total cost of CHF 542. ETH Zurich will bear the costs according to the following personnel categories:
Personnel category Cost reimbursement Maximum in CHF
1st day 2nd day
Professors 50% 50% 542.–
Employees incl. postdocs 100% 50% 738.–
Students incl. doctoral students 100% 80% 855.60
ETH Zurich will reimburse these costs to parents on application. If parents require additional emergency care hours, they must bear the costs themselves, according to profawo’s pricing structure.
ETH members can apply for a protected page refund from Human Resources within 30 days of receiving support and paying the corresponding invoice. An electronic copy of profawo’s invoice must be included.
When this has been verified, the refund will be made to the ETH employee’s payroll account, or in the case of ETH students to their personal bank account.
external page Profawo has been promoting the compatibility of family and career since 1996. As a link between employers and employees, profawo offers a wide range of services in the area of child and family care. They continuously monitor the ever-changing requirements in the world of work and are constantly developing new concepts and services relating to the compatibility of family and career with a balanced relationship between social components and business aspects.
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