Founding Partner Spotlight: Home Instead Markham
Elderado – November 5, 2026
Home Instead Markham
Founded: 2020
Service Area: Home Instead Markham proudly serves Markham, Unionville, Thornhill, Swan Lake Village, Markham Village, German Mills, Thornlea, Cachet, Milliken, Box Grove, Cornell, Greensborough, Raymerville, Buttonville, and Berczy Village
Featured: Jake Mitten, Owner and Managing Director, Home Instead Markham
Home Instead Markham Profile: HERE
Why are you passionate about home care?
I have my mom to thank for that. She’s been a nurse for over 30 years, and she spent the last stretch of her career in geriatrics out in the community. She’d come home and tell me the same thing over and over: there just weren’t enough high-quality options to help seniors with complex needs stay in their own homes.
That stuck with me. These are people who’ve given so much over their lives, and when they want to stay home, they deserve real support to make that possible. I knew we could build something better than what was out there. So I partnered with my mom and brought Home Instead, the world’s largest senior home care provider, to Markham.
What are you most proud of about Home Instead Markham?
How adaptable we are. Adaptability is one of our 5 core values, and it’s up on the wall in our office for a reason.
Every senior’s situation is different. You’d think after serving hundreds of families we’d have seen it all by now, but we still get surprised. What I’m proud of is how the team responds. We don’t say “we can’t do that.” We ask “how can we do it?” In this work, that’s what separates actually solving a family’s problem from just filling a shift.
And that only works because of the people. Our team is mission-driven, top to bottom, and they’ll do whatever it takes to help a family keep their loved one home longer. Because home is where people want to be.
I’m also proud that we’re locally owned by my family, right here in Markham. When a family trusts us with their mom or dad, there’s a real person accountable, not a 1-800 number in another city.
What do you believe Home Instead Markham does particularly well?
We keep highly complex clients living safely at home, and we give families room to breathe while we do it.
The reason we can is our nurse-led care model. Our nurses aren’t there just for the intake paperwork. They’re involved in every part of the care: building the plan, supervising the Care Pros, guiding families through each change, and helping them plan ahead instead of react. Every family gets a nurse they can actually reach, backed by a 24/7 support line. That’s one of the pieces families tell us matters most, a trusted partner on the other end of the phone when something changes.
It also lets us safely provide care that goes beyond what a caregiver typically can. Under nurse delegation and supervision, our Care Pros can support things like medication management, catheter care, and oxygen therapy. For a lot of families, that’s what makes staying home possible instead of moving to a facility.
What does going above and beyond for a client look like at Home Instead Markham?
Honestly, a lot of what other people would call “above and beyond” we just call the job.
A client takes a turn at 9pm and needs someone at the house that night, so we send someone. A family’s facing a complicated hospital discharge, so one of our nurses sits with them for 3 hours to work through it and makes sure she’s there when their loved one gets home. One of our clients loves watching afternoon mass on TV in the living room, so we went to a handful of stores across the city to find the right sit-to-stand chair so she could get up and down on her own. And we’ve thrown some pretty great birthday parties for our clients.
None of that is on a service menu. For us it’s just what the work looks like when you strive to exceed your client’s expectations.
What makes Home Instead Markham caregivers special?
Experience matters, and for a lot of our roles we’re looking for a specific background. But the thing we screen hardest for is heart. Is this someone who genuinely lights up helping others? Does our mission land with them? Will they drop what they’re doing to help someone who needs it right now? When the answer is yes, that’s who we hire, for caregiving and for the office.
You can teach most skills. You can’t teach a warm personality or a real heart for people. That’s the part families feel in every interaction with our team, and it’s why we care so much about authenticity.
What do you love most about working with older adults and their families?
The stories. The older adults we work with have lived full lives, all walks of life, and you could spend 1,000 hours with them and still not hear it all. These are people who worked hard, raised families, and gave to their communities for decades. Now it’s their turn to be looked after, and getting to be part of that is a real privilege.
Then there are the families. We work with people who would do anything for their mom or dad. Watching that kind of love up close, and getting to support it, is one of the best parts of the job.
What’s something about Home Instead Markham that families probably wouldn’t know from looking at a website or brochure?
How much of what we do is really for the family.
We set out to help seniors, but we’ve built our whole system around supporting the people around them too. That looks like helping a family navigate a confusing healthcare system, flagging aging-in-place issues before they become emergencies, sending shift notes so they know how the day went, and quietly giving them the ability to sleep through the night knowing mom and dad are looked after. When the weight comes off the family, everything gets more stable, and the senior gets to stay home longer. You don’t see that part on a brochure, but it’s often the thing families tell us changed the most.
What’s one thing you wish families understood about home care before they needed it?
The difference between government-funded care and private care.
Publicly funded home care does real good, and we’re grateful it exists. But for most seniors with real needs, it isn’t enough on its own to maintain a good quality of life. Hours are capped, the visits are short and often not when you need them, the scope is limited, and families managing dementia in particular can feel left out. There’s also less oversight and continuity than most people would expect. I wish more families understood this before they’re in crisis mode. Publicly funded care usually won’t cover the bulk of what a senior needs over the long run, and when there’s a gap, it often lands on the family (or worse, it doesn’t get addressed and it leads to an emergency). That’s where so much of the burnout comes from. You don’t have to solve it all at once. But knowing the reality early lets you plan ahead instead of scrambling, and it makes the next few years a lot smoother.
Live-in Care at Home Instead Markham
What is Live-in care?
On the days a Care Pro is scheduled, they stay in the home and provide continuous, around-the-clock support, so a senior who needs 24/7 care has someone with them all the time to help if needed. To be clear, the caregiver doesn’t move in permanently. They’re there for their working days and rotate out.
What makes it unique is that many home care companies only provide hourly care and not a live-in option. Others offer it on paper but don’t have the experience to run it well, and live-in is one of the hardest arrangements in home care to get right. There are a lot of moving parts to it, and that’s why a lot of companies choose to just opt out of offering it. We’ve built ours to hold up over the long haul, usually with a small, consistent team of Care Pros rotating through, so the same familiar faces are caring for the individual and no one burns out. That consistency is what protects the quality of care over months and years.
It’s also the more affordable way to get true 24/7 coverage at home, and a real alternative to moving mom or dad into a facility.
Who can best utilize live-in care?
Seniors who need support around the clock but want to stay in their own home. That’s often someone with complex or advancing needs: dementia, a high fall risk, a difficult recovery after a hospital stay, or someone in a palliative stage where the family wants them home for the time they have left.
It’s also for the families behind them. The adult child who lives out of town and can’t be there daily. The spouse who’s been the caregiver and is running on empty. The family staring down a move to assisted living or long-term care and looking for another option. Live-in care is often what keeps that move from being the only choice on the table.
How did Home Instead Markham develop expertise in live-in care?
Live-in is where families call us when they’re out of options, so we’ve done a lot of it, and complex placements teach you fast. Every arrangement sharpened how we match caregivers, how we build the schedule, and how our nurses stay ahead of changes before they become emergencies. Being part of the world’s largest home care network, we drew on what our neighbouring Home Instead offices had learned from offering this service. The years of nursing experience across our client care team also gave us the clinical backbone from day one. It was clear early on that live-in care filled a real need in our community, so we made a deliberate choice to build genuine expertise in it rather than shy away from putting in the hard work to get it right. We don’t claim to be perfect, but our willingness to try new things and stop doing what doesn’t work is what lets us keep getting better at this.
What does it take to provide best in class live-in care?
A regular visit ends and the caregiver goes home. Live-in doesn’t, and that changes the whole job. The big difference most families don’t anticipate is everything that comes with having someone in the home around the clock. There’s a whole logistical side to work out up front: where the caregiver sleeps, which bathroom they use, how groceries and meals are handled, WiFi access, and how the household runs day to day. When you have someone there 24/7, you’re also taking on a lot more responsibility for the home itself. None of that is part of a standard hourly visit, so it takes a thorough setup process to get right before care even starts.
On top of that, three things have to be solid. Matching is everything, because you’re placing someone in a family’s home for the long haul and the wrong fit shows up fast. You need a backup roster of live-in caregivers ready to step in, so a caregiver getting sick doesn’t leave a family stranded overnight. And you need real nurse oversight watching for the small changes in someone’s condition that a live-in arrangement can otherwise miss.
Get all of that right and it’s the most stable care a family can have. Get it wrong and it’s chaos in someone’s living room.
What should families look for when choosing a provider for live-in care?
The main thing to look for is a provider who has real structure behind their live-in care, not just a willingness to offer it. The best way to find that out is to ask the right questions.
Ask how they match caregivers, and what happens when a match doesn’t work out. Ask who covers the shift when a caregiver is sick, because “we’ll figure it out” is not sustainable plan. Ask how involved their nurses actually are once care starts, not just at the assessment. And ask about the schedule, because a good provider should be able to walk you through how they structure it, who’s on when, and how they keep familiar faces in the home. The schedule is a bigger part of getting this right than most people expect, and it’s a fair way to gauge how much live-in care a provider has actually done. When the match and the schedule are set up well from the start, these arrangements can run smoothly for years.
One more thing worth understanding is the choice a lot of families are weighing for live-in care: hiring privately versus going through an agency. Hiring someone directly can look cheaper up front. But when you hire privately, you often become that person’s legal employer, which can mean payroll, source deductions, WSIB, vacation pay, and liability if they get hurt in your home. There’s also no backup when they’re sick and no oversight of the care. With a regulated agency, that all sits with the agency instead. Plenty of providers offer live-in on paper. Fewer have the structure behind it to keep it running well over the long term, and that structure is what makes the difference.
Home Instead Markham is a Home Care Founding Partner
We’re proud to recognize Home Instead Markham as one of the Founding Partners who helped bring Home Care Navigation to life on Elderado. Our Founding Partners believed in our vision, provided feedback, and committed to greater transparency to for anyone looking for home care.
Home Care Navigation on Elderado was built to make it easier for families to understand and compare their home care options.
Home Instead Markham on Elderado: Click Here