Offering the best in Home Care & Nursing for Vancouver Island

CommunityPlus provides personal home-caregiving & nursing services to those in need across Vancouver Island. We offer from 1 hour a week to 24 hours a day, companionship through end-of-life care. Locally owned and operated from Metchosin with Coordinators living in the communities of Victoria, Sooke and Nanaimo. Your source for Vancouver Island health knowledge and BC’s only Living Wage care provider for skilled community-health services.

We offer great caregivers the best wages and benefits in private care. At the same time we maintain the lowest overhead expense in the industry – so our bill rate remains reasonable. Our priority is stable employment with high quality reliable people over years and hopefully a career. This allows us to deliver the quality and continuity that other providers only advertise.

CommunityPlus runs on in-house care software designed and developed by the owner, an 18 year home care scheduling veteran. We are small but mighty, a for-profit with no profit focused on developing and delivering excellence in community health.

Check out the Rates page to compare us with other local providers.

– Nanaimo comparison coming soon! –

Email Us

Email us for more information about your home healthcare options.

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Phone Us

Dial 250-658-6508 on your home phone, or simply click this button to call us from your mobile phone.

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A Home-Care Service Built for You

Compassionate, personal home-care & nursing services in Greater Victoria and the surrounding areas.

24/7 phone support
Online schedules & care documentation for clients & families through our web portal
Escorts for errands and appointments
Homemaking including meals and light housekeeping

Personal care, bathing and medication oversight
1 hour minimum visits, no weekly minimum hours
Live-in, overnight & 24-hour support
Condition-specific care for ALS, MS, Parkinson’s and other motor neuron diseases

Committed to

Service

The CommunityPlus team provides home-based Caregiving, Nursing and Footcare services. Quality people stay with us long term for living wages, great health benefits and efficient admin support. This translates to an annual retention rate over 90% for 8 years now. We have grown to over 70 employees Island-wide and look forward to bringing skilled care & living wages to every Island community.

We have over 50 caregivers across Greater Victoria and can meet the need for skilled caregiving & nursing in all areas between Sidney & Sooke.

As of 2023 we provide services in Nanaimo and surrounding areas. Live-in services are available across Vancouver Island.

We’re a Living Wage

Employer

We hire experienced, passionate caregivers and provide them with the support they need to be radiant in our clients’ lives. Through our team’s passion and experience we are able to provide 1-hour to 24-hour support, including overnight and live-in services, with continuity of care with quality caregivers.

We support

Urgent discharges
Post-op support
Short-term care needs
Remote-area services
Complex care with challenging or specific requirements

We’re Focused on

What’s Important

Integrity of Purpose
We are committed to developing and delivering better care and support to our clients, their families and our employees.
Transparency
Direct communication, clear policies and experts with an informed understanding of home support. We will explain the details and process behind effective support.
Trust
We only hire career caregivers that we would place with our own family members.
Community
We strengthen and give back to our community through education and advocacy.

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Compassionate Home Care and Nursing in Victoria

Frequently Asked

Home Care Questions

Starting Care

Starting is often the hardest part. Many of us are highly resistant to the idea that we need any sort of help or support. There is often a fear that family or the caregivers coming to help us will try to change our routines and interfere with what we want to do and how we want to live. We’ve each struggled to define the boundaries of our lives and develop personal security in our daily routines. Respecting people’s chosen boundaries is key to our philosophy of care.

We are not there to “make” anyone do anything. We enlist people’s cooperation. Caregiving is about understanding a person’s routines and personal-security needs in order to support how they choose to live, even when they make choices with which others may not agree. We take people as they are, and meet them where and how they choose to live without judgement.

Self-determination

We are all scared of having our choice and self-determination taken away. Because family are often the people in a position to make decisions about our care when we are no longer able; it is common to see people hiding their health and ability declines from the people they are closest to. Denial and anger in the face of decline is very common. People who are difficult and evasive with family for these reasons are often much easier behaved and trusting with a caregiver (stranger) that doesn’t have power over them. People often refuse the idea of care because they are scared and avoiding intrusion but then welcome the support once it’s in the home.

Respecting people’s right to self-determination is necessary to build and maintain trust in any relationship. We all have strongly developed security behaviors. It is important to listen to them, respect their ability to express their wishes and self-determination even when they are not safe or rational decision-makers.

Service Agreements

Signing the Service Agreement comes with no obligation to ever have service. It gives us permission to provide the listed services if and when they are requested.

Agreements are often set up in advance of care being required so that it only takes a phone call to start when the time comes.

Service Requests

Service can be requested and scheduled a year in advance or within an hour. Our ability to meet short-notice requests is determined by staffing capacity and the type of service being requested.

We are the only private provider that regularly responds to same and next day service changes, intakes, urgent discharges and overnight or live-in requests.

If urgent, unexpected service requests are a frequent occurrence, ask us about strategies for success.

Hourly or Weekly Minimums

Our minimum duration is one hour per visit – Increasing in half-hour increments. We are the only private care agency regularly providing short visits under two hours in length.

We do not have a weekly minimum hourly requirement. We will provide services as little as 1 hour per week if that is what’s needed.

Many organizations have minimums of two, three or even four hours per visit. Scheduling and staffing become easier at the three-hour mark, but may not provide service flexibility to meet your needs without unnecessary expense.

Some organizations require a weekly minimum number of hours (e.g., nine hours per week). This is because smaller services have zero or negative financial return.

Specific Time Requests

Specific timing is one of the primary challenges in home care. Many people want the same services at the same times. We prioritize timing on a needs basis and will discuss time flexibility of services beforehand.

Who We Hire

Our caregiving team is almost uniformly skilled, with 10 years of experience on average, and capable of providing companionship through end-of-life care. All are bonded and insured with regular police checks.

Living Wages

We pay a Living Wage, with health benefits & dental. We keep our employees for the long term, with an annual retention rate of over 90%.

Caregiver Placement

Possible home-caregiver placements are dictated by distance and time. Then we find the best fit from those options. Good coordination means home caregivers aren’t rushed and aren’t rushing their clients in turn.

Good coordination also means the caregivers have effectively scheduled blocks of work and enough hours each week to sustain themselves without insecurity. This is a part of the secret to success for clients in home care. Meeting caregivers’ needs consistently allows them to focus on meeting the needs of others.

Caregiver Supervision

Caregivers are primarily supervised and supported by the Coordination Team, with clinical education from the Nursing Team.

Common Interests & Language

We always seek to place home caregivers with clients who have common interests and language(s). We want clients and caregivers alike to feel safe and comfortable with each other. We avoid placements that create an unfriendly or unsafe work environment.

Removing Caregivers

The client or authorized relative(s) can always decide who is part of the caregiving team. We think our people are generally exceptional. We appreciate frank and honest feedback if you find otherwise.

Visit Cancellations

Visits can be cancelled with no charge by giving at least 24-hours notice. Visits without notice are charged half. Once the caregiver is on the way to the home, the visit cannot be cancelled or reduced.

Travel Time

Roughly 15 minutes of each visit is allocated to the time necessary for travel to and from your home. There is no kilometre charge for this travel.

More time may be allocated for travel during hazardous weather conditions or in instances where people live far away from population centres.

Documentation

Home caregivers write notes about each visit, which become part of the client record. Employees write in a formalized, factual narrative, avoiding personal opinions or conjecture.

Communication

To keep communications consolidated and clear, we ask that one family member acts as the main contact who is responsible for communication service changes. This is usually the person with Power of Attorney or the most local family member.

Invoices

Invoices are sent out monthly (12 per year) and may be paid by cheque, e-transfer, credit card or bank payment through Royal Bank of Canada (RBC).

This contrasts with other organizations, which send out bimonthly (24) or biweekly (26) invoices.

Receipts

There are no monthly receipts or paper records of any kind. For ease of accounting, one receipt is sent out annually, documenting all services rendered.

Possible & Unforeseen

We operate in terms of the possible. If someone wants a one-hour-a-day service in Tofino, the question is not ‘Can we provide it?’ but, ‘Do the means allow for the additional travel cost?’ This would be from the nearest geographical area where we can assemble a team to provide reasonable certainty of stable and continuous service. If it costs an additional eight hours of travel to provide a one-hour service onsite, it makes sense to seek a more efficient approach to care delivery. We are happy to suggest potential alternatives or supplements.

We are willing to take on challenges to provide services that may be delicately staffed, but staffing circumstances can change. When what is possible changes due to employee relocation, injury, absence or other reasons, it is important to have a back-up plan for gaps or replacement of service. When the unforeseen occurs, we often have short notice.

In densely populated areas, it is more viable to maintain continuous service in the face of exceptional circumstances. As services become shorter in duration and further away from population centres, the team continuity is often exceptional — but the ability to provide stable service is more delicate and easily broken.

The Company

Creating security for the vulnerable since 2017.

2007 to 2016
- Owner worked in home care for local government and private, national agency
- Roles included: Caregiver, Coordinator, Coordination Educator, and Operations & HR Manager
2016
- Created business systems to automate admin and prepare for scaling
- Shaped the first design iterations of our home-care software
2017
- Began providing service as Community Care Home Health
- Started the year with 2 people and ended with 12+
2018
- Started the year with 12+ people and ended with 24+
- Incorporated as Community Plus Care Ltd
- Began home-care software programming
2019
- Started the year with 24+ people and ended with 36+
- Added Nursing services
- Began providing My911 Kits (free, magnetic envelopes)
2020
COVID Y1
- Started and ended a challenging year with 36+ people
- Added Footcare, Occupational & Physical Therapy services
- Donated $5,500 in free driving to cancer patients when volunteer drivers could not operate
2021
COVID Y2
- Grew to 50+ people
- Added Daily Phone Call services
- Began using our home-care software in alpha
2022
COVID Y3
- Continued providing community services across circumstances and geography with unmatched effectiveness
- Our software provided many unique advantages and efficiencies over other services
2023
Whatever May Come
- We have contracts across all sectors of caregiving
- We are polishing our software that provides unmatched efficiencies in service provision
- We have the best-paid, most-skilled group of caregivers providing services others cannot
- We have the lowest operating margin in the industry and are competitively priced
Whatever may come, we look forward to overachieving through another year of challenges and opportunities. The best can always get better.

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Offering the best in Home Care & Nursing for Vancouver Island

Email Us

Phone Us

A Home-Care Service Built for You

Service

Employer

What’s Important

Compassionate Home Care and Nursing in Victoria

Home Care Questions

The Company

2007 to 2016

2016

2017

2018

2019

2020

2021

2022

2023

Contact by Mail

Email

Phone

My911 Kit