Greater Hazleton’s Business & Arts Magazine
HABC: Comfort Keepers is a fairly new company
in Hazleton. What is the story behind how the
company started both corporately and in your
instance?
Marlin Duncan: Actually, the story is really interesting. A
nurse who was involved with home health was having her
client ask her to do things such as putting the clothes from
the washer into the dryer, or “I need some transportation,
I don’t have any food in the house, and there are a lot of
things I could use help with.” As the nurse started trying to
help this woman with these things, she found herself kind
of getting into a little trouble because those duties were not
within the job description of a home health nurse. From
that, she and her husband decided they wanted to start a
company to help people in the home, to make it possible
for them to stay in the home and to take care of those little
things that were falling by the wayside, the things that the
family would do if the family could be there. A lot of times,
today, the family can’t be there all the time. And this was,
exactly, my situation.
I am not only the owner of Comfort Keepers in Hazleton,
I am also a consumer of home care services for my fatherin-law in California. We ran into one of those family
situations which was very tragic for us in that my motherin-law got Alzheimer’s. They found her at the police station
at four o’clock in the morning, saying there was a strange
man living in her home. And at that time, we were totally
unaware of home care or what home care could do. Our
minds were on the things that everyone else’s minds are on,
and it wasn’t related to home care. However, we needed to
make an emergency visit to California to figure out how
we were going to help Mom. And when we went out there,
Mom was placed in an assisted living facility that specialized
in Alzheimer’s, and then we began to realize how much Dad
needed help. He was in a situation where he was blind in
one eye and had probably ten percent vision in the other.
This is going back to about 1999. We started looking for
good care in the home for him, dependable care in the
home. And it was through that process of looking for care
that I became very aware of the need for families to have
help for their loved ones in the home. I also became aware
that it wasn’t that easy to find people who were dependable.
So it was through this process that I found out about
Comfort Keepers.
HABC
July 1, 2014
In December of 2002, I went out to Ohio to meet with the
owners of Comfort Keepers and to go through a business
evaluation process to see whether or not this franchise
was exactly what I was interested in. As a result, I found
Comfort Keepers to be a wonderful match with me in 2003,
and we’ve continued to grow ever since.
HABC: How would you describe the relationship
your company has with the greater health care
industry?
Marlin Duncan: It’s interesting because this (relationship)
is beginning to change a lot, especially with the Affordable
Care Act. For instance, hospitals are under a lot of pressure
to make sure that in the first thirty days after someone is
discharged from the hospital, they do not return to the
hospital. There are penalties that have been put in place that
hospitals have to pay based on this re-entry.
Comfort Keepers can be a key factor in helping ensure that
this does not occur, because most of the reasons people
have re-entry into the hospital are not medically related.
They are incidentally related. What I mean by that is, several
things tend to happen when a person who doesn’t have
family support gets discharged from the hospital. Number
5