About me
Founder Healthcare Assist
I believe success means more when it creates opportunities for others too.
Kelly
For me, healthcare has always been about people.
I’m Kelly, founder of Healthcare Assist.
My roots are in healthcare. I started my career in acute care, working as an Emergency Department triage nurse. After many years of working directly with patients, I decided to broaden my perspective and make a career shift. I completed a pre-master’s programme in Healthcare Ethics and moved into healthcare management, commercial roles, project management and organisational change.
That journey allowed me to experience healthcare from very different perspectives, from being right there with patients when they needed care, to looking at the bigger picture: how we organise healthcare, make decisions, implement change and ultimately create better outcomes for people.
But no matter what role I was in, I kept coming back to the same thing: How can we make things better?
Over the years, I’ve learned that health and wellbeing are about much more than healthcare alone. They are influenced by the opportunities people have, the communities they live in, the organisations around them and whether they can actually access the things they need.
FROM HEALTHCARE TO SOCIAL IMPACT
I’ve always been someone who sees a problem and immediately starts thinking about how it could be done differently.
And I love entrepreneurship just as much as I care about making a difference.
For a long time, those felt like two separate worlds. Today, I see that they don’t have to be. I believe you can build a successful business and do something genuinely good at the same time.
In fact, I believe entrepreneurship can make social impact stronger. Instead of creating initiatives that depend entirely on donations or temporary funding, we can build smart business models that generate their own income, create local opportunities and keep making an impact as they grow.
That belief is becoming the heart of Healthcare Assist.
I want to bring together healthcare, entrepreneurship and social impact to create solutions that work for businesses while making something better, easier or more accessible for the communities around them.
Starting in Curaçao, with the ambition to create meaningful impact across the Caribbean.
Because for me, success means more when others get to benefit from it too.
WHY CURAÇAO?
Curaçao has become much more than a place to go to for me. It’s a place I genuinely care about. Living on the island gave me the chance to experience Curaçao beyond the beautiful beaches and everything we see as visitors. I got to know the people, everyday life and also some of the challenges that exist behind the picture-perfect image.
And that made me think.
There is so much opportunity on the island, but not everyone has equal access to it. At the same time, Curaçao has a strong tourism sector, international businesses and people who genuinely want to contribute to the community.
I want to connect those worlds.
Not through charity alone, but by creating businesses and partnerships that are commercially successful while allowing part of that success to flow back into the community.
That is why Curaçao feels like the natural place for Healthcare Assist to start building it’s social-impact initiatives.
And because the best ideas don’t come from sitting behind a desk in the Netherlands, I want to build them together with the people I’ve met and connected with on the island. Listening to their experiences, understanding what is really needed and creating solutions together.
For Curaçao, with Curaçao.
