Steve: Now, last but not least. Bob, I hadn't realized that you were originally a banker. So, maybe you could you tell us a little about your banking experience and how you moved from the banking business to being in the home care business.
Bob: Certainly. I was in the investing banking arm of a major Canadian bank, in their risk management group. I started off on the foreign exchange trading desk, in Toronto, and I had responsibility for providing advice to some of the most major corporations in Canada, in terms of hedging working with them to hedge their foreign currency exposure. So, I worked in a trading room environment where there was three hundred and fifty people, very noisy, very pressured environment, but very exciting very much a young person's game. But it helped me with my background in economics, my training in school in economics it enabled me to use my education in a real sense to help advise corporations on managing their currency exposure. That evolved, where I eventually took over responsibility for the corporate foreign exchange trading desk, for the bank and then they ultimately transferred me to Vancouver where I took over responsibility for the entire treasury operation, which encompassed foreign exchange, money markets, fixed incomes, as well as the derivatives desk.
Steve: Did you enjoy that environment? Is it sort of an exciting environment? Everyday has new changes I mean nothing ever stays the same for very long.
Bob: That was absolutely the case, Steve. Minute by minute the markets were changing. There were news items that would come out, there would be speculation and there would be rumors and that always had impact on the value of the currency. So it was tremendously exciting. As you know, the currency markets are traded twenty-four hours a day, so the markets didn't or the work didn't stop at 4:30 or 5:00 o'clock. They continued all night long. I had clients, you know major international corporations that were trading twenty-four hours a day. This was before the day of cell phones or being able to trade on the internet. So, I would stay up at night and take calls and take orders from my clients that would be in Danbury, Connecticut or while I dealt with many major corporations. I would unplug the phones upstairs and sleep downstairs and take my calls from my clients. I would phone through to Melbourne or Tokyo or London to trade on their behalf, so it was a tremendously exciting time.
Steve: Was it too exciting? What made you decide then to move? How did you get from there to your present work? Maybe you should explain a little bit -jump right. fast forward to what you do now and then maybe connect the two later on.
Bob: Sure. Well, after I was moved up to manage the treasury operations here in Vancouver, I had an opportunity to be a director of my brother's software company. That gave us a tremendous opportunity during the internet bubble to eventually be bought out. I saw that the future for me in investment banking was fairly short lived. It's very much a young man's game. You've got to make hay while the sun shines. I saw a limited future for myself so I took the opportunity to leave the bank. I was very fortunate to be able to have that opportunity. I took about a year and a half off and got involved in healthcare. So, I am now involved as the Executive Director with two home care agencies. It made a huge shift in my career into healthcare.
Steve: Maybe you could explain a little bit what you mean by home care and I presume this is actually a growth industry here in all of western society, or Japan, developed societies. What sort of service do you provide?
Bob: Well home care, I guess, within our healthcare system, there has been a recognition that it's a far healthier environment for our elderly to age within their own homes, rather than in institutions. They recover faster from surgeries or from illnesses, in their own home environment. They have a better quality of life and it's also less expensive for the healthcare system if people are in their own homes. So there's a tremendous move under way to build our home care system. So, what we do is we provide the services of individuals that go into people's homes to help them maintain their independence, to help them with their medical needs. Whether it's reminding them to take their medications or to help them with their personal needs, to things like cooking. Basically, the whole intent is to help them have a better quality of life. So, one of our enterprises has three hundred twenty-five care aides. We provide a thousand hours of service per day to twelve hundred seniors in our local community. The whole objective is to help them to maintain their dignity and their quality of life, in their own homes.
Steve: You said one of the agencies has three hundred twenty-five caregivers - how about the other agency?
Bob: The other agency is relatively new. It has only been in business for about two years. It currently has about fifty employees. It provides a broader range of services, to the extent that it does house cleaning. It provides companionship services. So to the extent that if someone wants someone to go with them on a trip or go for a drive for the day. We provide them with that. We will also walk the dog. We will also provide the traditional home care services that are available through the larger agency, but basically a broader range of services that we make available.
Steve: Can I assume therefore that the first deals with the services that are covered by the Public Health System and the second is additional services?
Bob: That's absolutely the case, Steve. The larger one, ninety-eight percent of the funding comes.is via the healthcare system. The latter one is user-pay. If individuals want additional services over and above those that are available through the Public System then that's what's provided through that smaller organization. Steve: Now, that's an entirely different business from currency trading or working for a bank. What have been the major challenges in this business for you?
Bob: Well, within healthcare, there really wasn't a focus on the financial aspects of it for many years. They just expected the government to give them money. There was really no accountability. So, what? my biggest challenge was changing the attitudes and changing the cultures such that they thought about it as more of a business and being more client-focused, as opposed to being focused on the employees. So, that's been by far, the biggest challenge, is really creating a culture of accountability. It takes time. It's changing attitudes but I think we've largely been successful in achieving that. It's really building a balance between providing care, which is client service, and treating it like a business so that it's sustainable. Steve: Now we've heard about the, sort of, changing cultural makeup of a lot of Vancouver and Surrey and the surrounding area. How does that affect both the people who are receiving the care and people who are providing the care? Are you finding now that you are dealing with different cultural environments at both ends?
Bob: Very much so. The demographics of the population, in particular, in areas like White Rock and South Surrey, create a challenge in so far as the demographics of our employee group don't necessarily always mesh and so there are language considerations.There's accent mitigation situations where the client can't understand what the care aide is saying. Those are situations that we have to deal with on an ongoing basis and it does create particular challenges. It's a positive challenge, and I think, one that really causes both parties to be more responsive to each other. Steve: Are you able in any way to prioritize or direct people who have a certain language background to clients who have, are of a similar cultural background? Or is this not practical to do in your sort of situation?
Bob: Within our private pay organization, it is very easy to do. We can be very client-centric and be able to match the requirements of the client with a particular individual. In the larger organization, where it's the Public Pay system, we come under the auspices of a collective agreement and it's much more difficult. Where it is based on seniority, you have to put whoever has the most seniority into the next job in line. So we are not always able to meet the. to match the ethnicity of the client with the ethnicity of the individual providing the service.
Steve: Of course, presumably it's not so much the ethnicity but the language skills that are the major concern there. Bob: That's very much the case. That's very much the case. Steve: So, what are your major plans or projects things that you would like to achieve over the next period within those two companies?
Bob: Well, within the larger company we are looking at the opportunity of being able to match the scope of service with the needs of the individual. Certainly, the broader opportunity, greater opportunity is within the private pay organization, being able to broaden the scope of services by offering an advocacy service for seniors. There's a lot of services that are available in the community but they are not always made aware or readily available to the individual, so we are starting an advocacy service. We see that there is a greater need for housecleaning. That's not provided by the Public System. Safety is a key consideration and a lot of that has to do with the quality of the environment they live in. So, we're looking at expanding our housecleaning services so that it makes the environment more safe for the individual and that's not available through the Public System. Steve: So when you say "advocacy" you are saying you would like to persuade the Public System that they should contribute more towards some of these other activities which actually do contribute to the health and welfare of the elderly people? Bob: That would be part of it. That would definitely be part of it. One of the bigger challenges that we have is changing the system's perception of the healthcare worker, of the actual home care worker. The perception is that they are the bottom end, bottom rung of the healthcare system and yet as the demographics change and we become an older population, the complexity of care that they are expected to provide, increases. And so, obviously the nature of their skills is going to have to be upgraded. The biggest challenge we face is in education and training. We just have to think forward to the kind of care that we want to have as individuals, or that we want for our parents, and what kind of individuals do we want providing that care. Obviously we want very skilled workers to do that. So there needs to be a change in the perception of the nature of this work.
Steve: Just the last question. To what extent are these kinds of services also provided by family members? Are the people that you deal with people who live alone or who don't have family members or is this supplementary to what family members do? You know sometimes people are critical of modern society as being a heartless society where people don't look after their elders the way they used to. Just a little bit of that flavor.
Bob: No, it's really quite striking because we would think that not much care comes from family, but a great deal if it does. In fact. there's a lot of consideration being given at this time, within the healthcare system, to providing support, whether it be financially, to the care givers within the family. And to more resources being devoted to what we call "respite care", to give the families a break and which, in turn, would mean that we would have to spend more resources on bringing care aides into the home to give those family members a rest. So, it is one thing that has been a revelation to me has been how much time we do, that families do give to taking care of their elderly family members.
Steve: Thank you. We're going to end it off with that. It's been, I must say, very, very interesting. This has been some of the most interesting content that I have collected. It gives us a bit of a broad brush of a community and people who are interested in serving their community and who are leading members of their respective professions. So, I thank you very much.
