The Health | MARCH, 2019
26
Seniors
A tribute
to our
elders
Homage combines elderly care
and tech to give the best services
to our seniors
By Christine Zoe Sta Maria
tency of working closely with one rather than a few.”
T
he care for the elderly is somewhat tradi-
tional, and have stayed traditional in a lot
of ways. It leaves quite a bit of room for
improvement, and improvement is what
CEO and Co-founder Gillian Tee is looking
to achieve with Homage.
Homage is a senior home care solution that com-
bines professional caregivers with smart technology
to provide home caregiving to seniors. It has provided
more than 100,000 hours of home caregiving to seniors
in Singapore and Malaysia and raised over $7milion
SGD (RM21 million) from venture capital firms Golden
Gate Ventures, Seed Plus, 500Startups and grants from
DBS Foundation, RaiSE and Singapore International
Chamber of Commerce.
Why Homage?
There are over 200 nursing homes around Malaysia, yet
nobody actually wants to be in any of them, let along
be forced to live in one . Some may feel like it is forced
migration. We feel that the need to provide a more
comfortable and personal care is there,” she starts.
“Another factor to look at is the conditions of the
nursing homes and how trained their caregivers are. It
may vary largely between each homes and the elderly
are the ones to suffer for it.”
As for the need for caregivers, Tee explains that it
varies between individuals, and personal care in their
own homes are more effective. “It’s a different story
for every family as care needs depends on the medical
conditions. But for most, we see that the elderly who
have conditions such as dementia, Parkinson’s, stroke
and cancer need caregivers to go about their daily
activities.”
“This is why we have to help them in terms of nursing
and personal activities. On the other hand, we also
have elderlies who are not ill. But they need help and
assistance nonetheless. The needs are different because
what each person goes through is different so we do
see chronic and social care required. We also provide
medical escort to help take them from their home to
the hospital for their appointments.”
Who is involved in Homage?
“We have been in conversation with a number of
training providers, and we are now working with the
International Medical College (IMC), which is under
the International Medical University Malaysia (IMU),”
says Tee.
“We understand what the needs are from the care-
giving standpoint so we know what training we are
looking for. Based on our conversations, we committed
ourselves to a single partner as we believe the consis-
The caregivers
Gillian Tee explaining what Homage
is and what Homage does.
Gillian Tee, CEO and Co-founder of Homage,
asking for a show of hands from those who
are caregivers in their own homes.
Caregivers are selected carefully by the Homage team,
and they provide training for the ones who are not
trained.
“If they are not a registered nurse, they would have
to go through our training. We also have in-person
interviews, background checks to make sure they have
all the documentation, CPR certification and tubercu-
losis screening. We have very vigorous checks.”
“Our acceptance rate is only about 3% because we
have thousands of applications but we only select a
few because we want to maintain the high quality of
our care. For nurses, they need to go through all of the
mentioned except for training. They also need to have at
least one year of caregiving experience. We are hoping
to have recruited 100 caregivers by the end of 2019,”
she adds.
“Some of the elderly would take time opening up to
our caregivers, yet eventually they do feel comfortable
with them. They end up being more comfortable with
the caregivers and look forward to their visits.”
“This is because our caregivers provide a personal
approach unlike some caregivers in nursing home who
treat the elderly more like tasks. When you get treated
like a task, you would feel uncared for or neglected.
There are people who cannot speak and they have
complete dependency on our caregivers who will help
them bed sponge, shower them, make them feel better
in the morning.” — The Health