Advanced Home Care Solutions Inc. Expanding Across Canada, U.S. and the U.K.
Kris Stewart is CEO of the Kelowna-based Advanced Care Group of Companies
KELOWNA – An Okanagan healthcare services company that has experienced nearly 2,500 percent revenue growth in the last three years has been ranked #12 in The Globe & Mail’s fifth annual ranking of Canada’s Top Growing Companies.
Advanced Home Care Solutions Inc. CEO and Clinical Director Kris Stewart started the company in 2011 to offer highly qualified health care professionals to help seniors in their own homes, and the company now has offices in Vancouver and Toronto, with expansion across Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States over the next year – and other international destinations planned for the following year.
“By 2019, seeing huge gaps in staffing in hospitals and long-term care sites, I started providing those sites with our nursing personnel,” says Stewart, who holds BSc, RN, and MBA accreditation. “Covid exacerbated an already gaping void of staff at these sites. Covid actually created its own cottage industry. Nurses were quitting their jobs in short staffed hospitals and nursing homes to go to Covid testing centres, Covid contact tracing centres, and Covid vaccination centres where they didn’t have the stress of working short staffed. “We as a company were able to provide nurses with sufficient incentives to return to clinical practice at different locations of their choice.”
In a September 2022 article on Bloomberg, Stewart said her business model works because it dovetails perfectly with the psycho-demographics of both the new and experienced health care professionals like care aides and nurses who prefer the gig economy.
“When I took my MBA at Athabasca University, the ‘gig’ economy didn’t really exist,” she recalls. “The course work and human resources strategies I learn in my current Doctoral program have allowed me to pivot my business to where it is today by building an inclusive, psychologically supportive culture for all of our health care personnel.
“We ensure our organizations culture promotes civility and respect, psychological safety and we have clear leadership and expectations of administrative team. Our administrative team is passionate about placing healthcare professionals who are badly needed, in short staffed hospitals and long-term care facilities.“
Stewart understands that hospitals and nursing homes may want to keep their experienced health care workers as their own employees.
“So we’ve developed a novel way for these highly sought-after workers can become permanent employees of that site, as well as our standard short to mid-term assignment contracts with them,” she notes. “Those in leadership and influential positions have understood for years – decades actually – that natural attrition (retiring) of health care workers would cause additional shortages in the industry. Sadly, very few policies or resources have been developed or implemented to address the retirement of so many health care workers all within a few years of each other.
“That’s where temporary health care workers come in and that’s what we specialize in,” she says. “Ours is the ‘short game’ but that’s what is needed most right now while health care leaders build a ‘long game’ strategy”.
Stewart feels there’s still more growth for her company in the years ahead.
“I have just confirmed our legal ability to do business in all other provinces and I look forward to the international expansions underway,” she adds. “I am investigating all the opportunities and will be setting stable and maintainable goals to grow the company.”
Business Examiner Staff