Michaun Mattis — Bridging the gap

MICHAUN Mattis was an emergency room nurse when her mother was murdered 11 years ago. The tragedy not only pushed the then 23-year-old to become the matriarch for her two pre-teen sisters, but it also forced her to seek new career opportunities within the nursing profession for herself, as she could not endure having to relive her mother’s gruesome ending every time another trauma patient was admitted to Kingston Public Hospital (KPH). Her grief served as a catalyst for her to venture into entrepreneurship, and put her on the path to now operating one of the most diverse assisted living facilities in Jamaica.

“It was actually my mother who registered me for nursing school,” Mattis told All Woman from her Premier Nursing Solutions office at Sunrise Crescent in Kingston. “Before then I wanted to become a pilot, but when 9/11 happened, my mother said, ‘I feel like you’re going to die’ so she signed me up for Kingston School of Nursing.”

Mattis graduated from that institution as a registered nurse, then chose to do specialised training in emergency and trauma care, which took her abroad for internship.

“I stayed a little while in the United States,” she said. “It was a good experience working abroad, but it felt like something was wrong. It felt robotic and like I was suffocating, and I wasn’t happy, so I knew I had to come home.”

Mattis had her final set of exams to write the week after her mother was shot and killed in a robbery at her parents’ business place in June 2009.

“My mom was murdered on Friday, and I had my exams the following Monday,” she recalled grimly. “I still went ahead and did my exams on Monday and I was successful, but I had to defer my clinicals to be home, so my programme ended up stretching out for another few months.”

But though she completed training and had fallen in love with the “profession that keeps giving”, Mattis knew that she could not keep working in the hospital emergency room.

“Being an emergency room nurse at KPH, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to give effective care, especially knowing that I lost my mom like that, and I felt like I didn’t have the chance to provide emergency care for her,” she said.

A friend suggested that Mattis venture into the pharmaceutical side of the profession, so she interviewed with a local distributor and worked in sales as a medical representative for a number of years.

“What gave me the edge in the job was that I had experience in patient care, and I knew how to speak the language of the medical field to better promote my products to the medical practitioners and patients,” she recalled.

She then returned home to help her father and younger siblings to help the family bakery in Glengoffe, St Catherine, recover from her mother’s passing.

“So for a year and a half I went home to help out,” she shared. “But although I love baking and I’m good at it, I had a love/hate relationship with the business place, because that is where I lost my mom.”

When an opportunity presented itself for her to work as an emergency room nurse at the Jamaica Defence Force (JDF) medical facility at Up Park Camp, she could not resist returning to practising emergency medical care, albeit in a much smaller, less traumatic environment.

“That was another challenge in itself, but it was mostly the soldiers and their families who I worked with, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I knew that my calling was to provide care,” she said.

Around the same time, her partner was trying to find a nursing home for his ageing father, but was having a difficult time finding a suitable facility. The vast majority of the golden age homes they visited were crowded and in poor condition, or did not allow for a customised experience based on the needs and independence level of the clients. That frustrating experience provided Mattis with the silver lining she was looking for.

“I always had a love for entrepreneurship. I’m a licensed real estate agent, and I even operated a small clothing business,” she chuckled. “Since I returned from abroad, I was looking for a way to help diversify the nursing profession, since I did not want to return to the hospital. I was searching for a new way to care for people.”

Having grown up in a tight family unit with elderly relatives around her, including her ‘hottie hottie’ maternal grandmother, Mattis has an affinity and deep respect for the dignity and independence of ageing.

“We found that there are not a lot of facilities in Jamaica that provide specialised service to people who need senior care, but are not yet at the stage to be in a nursing home, but they still need some amount of supervision, so I left the JDF to create such a facility,” she shared.

After overcoming several hurdles in building and registering the facility, Mattis finally opened the doors of her nine-room assisted living/retirement home at 108 Sunrise Crescent at the beginning of this year. Visitors to the space are always pleasantly surprised by the high standard of the facility, and the range of services that is provided there.

“It’s the gap between a nursing home and being at home by yourself, or what we call a ‘bridge’ facility,” she explained. “It’s really for those people who are getting older and need some amount of assistance, but they still want to maintain their independence. Some of these people don’t have any children, or their family may be living overseas, while others just don’t want to live with their children. Some just want some companionship, so we also have different entertainment and fitness programmes for seniors who may just want an ‘adult daycare’ and then return to their homes everyday.”

Despite the slow start due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the facility is being received well, and Mattis is proud to be helping families to bridge the gap for their ageing loved ones. She hopes to soon be able to expand the facility to accommodate more residents, but for now she is content with her own growth over the last decade.

“A lot of the things that I have done and achieved, it’s really for my two younger sisters,” she said. “When my mom died, one was nine and the other was 13. Dad was there, and still is there, and he provided, but knowing the kind of mother that I had, I knew that I had to grow up and try to be their mom. I had to try to bridge that gap.”