“I can’t say enough positive things about the SAHN team… Everyone has been so kind and accommodating and encouraging. My people surround and support me.”
“Get out. Speak up. Write a letter to your MP. It’s so important to take a ‘home first’ approach to healing. We all need to support each other in this.”
~Home Care Ontario’s 2025 recipient of the Home Care Hero Award Melchora Gillis
“A hero?” Melchora Gillis asked the afternoon she received an unexpected phone call. She was in the middle of helping a client, an elderly gentleman, with his personal care when the phone rang so she was both distracted and a little impatient to get off the call quickly and return to work. “For what?”
Ending the call, she apologized for the interruption to her client, explaining that she had just learned she had received Home Care Ontario’s Home Care Hero Award, an award meant to celebrate ‘acts of everyday heroism’. She was surprised when her client began to weep. Happy tears, he explained. “I told you so,” he said. “You deserve this so much—you are so good at what you do. You are a hero.”
In April, the Home Care Hero Awards honoured 122 home healthcare professionals, shining a spotlight on the essential work of PSW’s, nurses, and home care therapists; Melchora was one of six recipients in the Niagara region. She was nominated for the award by her peers and co-workers due to her professionalism, her empathy, and her unflagging work ethic. Congratulated directly by Cynthia Martineau, the CEO of Home Care Ontario, Melchora was once again pleasantly surprised by the amount of positive attention the awards garnered in Ontario. While being profiled in newspaper articles and invited to speak on radio, it was critical to Melchora to emphasize the importance of the role of the entire Stay At Home Nursing team in leading to this moment of recognition.
“It’s difficult for me to feel that I deserve this attention. An individual award like this? It really is a hats off to the entire staff,” she explains. “I can’t say enough positive things about the SAHN team: Jenny, Kinzi, Tanya, Patrick, all my co-workers. Everyone has been so kind and accommodating and encouraging. My people surround and support me. For the newspaper article, I made sure they took my picture underneath the SAHN logo—because it truly is a team effort— and I wanted to emphasize how efficient, reliable, friendly, and professional our organization is.”
It was during COVID that Melchora moved to Fort Erie, leaving behind big city life and decades of work as a dental hygienist. She immediately loved the slow pace and the friendliness of small-town life. Wanting a change in her professional career, Melchora began working for SAHN two years ago. “Right from the beginning,” she explains, “it was an awesome fit. I love the work. And I have fabulous clients.”
Melchora found deep meaning in providing home healthcare, discovering that, in a profound way, supporting families navigating aging or illness at home was deeply therapeutic to her as well. “It’s so important for people to heal at home,” she says.” As an example, she relates the story of one of her regular clients. “He had to be hospitalized for seven days for a UTI. When he got home all he could say was: Thank God I’m home. Seven days was too long. I feel like I get more sick when I’m in the hospital.’”
Despite loving her new profession, Melchora is also realistic about the challenges. “It’s demanding,” she says. “Physically, mentally, emotionally. It is hard to deal with the grief when a client dies. It is hard when a client is not allotted sufficient home care hours. Sometimes I am only there long enough to have proper time to say hello and goodbye. For some clients, what is provided to them by the provincial government, well—it’s not fair. It’s not enough. And it’s heartbreaking when clients need more support than we can give them.” Articulate and passionate, Melchora has been able to use her recent Home Care Hero profile to highlight many of the issues facing home healthcare professionals and their clients.
Melchora’s strong position is that provincial government funding is required to radically expand home care services across the province. Caregivers could be supported better with increased training, better wages, and stable hours. Clients could be supported with more time, more care, so that vulnerable people are not falling through the cracks in a fractured healthcare system. “Here in Fort Erie,” she explains, “the demand for care far outweighs the resources available.”
Ever grateful for both the work and the unexpected opportunity of being able to raise awareness, Melchora points out that aging and illness are issues that—eventually—impact us all. “So many people are affected. We try to help but currently—it’s just not enough.” With no plans of ceasing her advocacy, Melchora—Home Care Hero that she is—urges others to join the fight. “Get out. Speak up. Write a letter to your MP. It’s so important to take a ‘home first’ approach to healing. We all need to support each other in this.”
