Founder Stories Series | MediStays

Sarah Everitt [00:00:02] It’s really humbling to know that you can have a positive impact on people’s lives. It’s very grounding and very rewarding. My name is Sarah Everitt and I’m the director and co-founder of Medistays. Medistays is a platform to support people on a medical journey, who need to be accommodated somewhere safe and trusted. The other co-founder is Craig, who is also my husband. Craig and I both had been working in cancer clinics for our entire careers. We both also grew up in country towns. And so we both loved meeting people that were traveling from the country but heard from them over and over how challenging it was to travel long distances for care and that one of the biggest barriers was finding somewhere safe to stay nearby. In 2016, my aunt was diagnosed with cancer and she was living in a remote outback community as a nurse. And she ended up flying to Sydney with the Royal Flying Doctor Service for emergency surgery. And it was at that time when we started Googling for accommodation for a family to stay with her and realized that the only options that we were coming up with a holiday websites. That was definitely the light bulb moment when we decided to take action and thought there must be a better way. We were really surprised by how significant this problem was. A study in New South Wales showed that for every 100 km people had to travel for cancer care the survival was reduced by 6 per cent. To get ready, Medistays developed and off the ground was a huge learning curve, and I guess we’re just continually on the vertical. Our first step was to set up an MVP basic website. The next step was really to create a platform where we had more relevant information for people, so accessibility, access to financial support, also support services and detailed information about the accommodation. We launched the Medistays website in 2017 with around 18 properties and now we have more than 700 properties Australia wide. Everybody within the Remarkable team is so passionate about positively impacting the lives of people with disabilities. So for the start ups involved in the program, it’s like they’re, just fully immersed in helping us succeed. It’s just so incredibly humbling. And we can have a really big day and that one tiny piece of feedback just absolutely fills my tank to want to strive and keep on supporting people in the future. [00:02:26]

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