Family Caregivers Caring for Family Information
August 31, 2010
Hosted by Dr. Gordon Atherley
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Guest Information
Episode Description
John Mills is the Founder and CEO of eCare Diary.com and Susan Baida is eCareDiary.com’s Co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer. A husband-and-wife team with extensive experience in healthcare policy and technology and in companies responsive to consumer needs, they became family caregivers. They were disappointed by and frustrated with the quality and level of family caregiver support they encountered. They describe how this experience convinced them to set up eCare Diary to improve information support for family caregivers. They talk about the information-related challenges faced by family caregivers and how the e-Care Diary helps them. They discuss caring for health and other family information, and explain why caring for family information is such an important responsibility for family caregivers. They explore what needs to be done to help family caregivers use information technology and the internet to enable them to safely manage their families’ health and family information.
Family Caregivers Unite!
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Family caregivers are the people who provide care to partners, parents, children, brothers, sisters, cousins, friends, neighbors and even co-workers. They are the people who provide care when everyone else has gone home. They are the people who organize the functioning of the home for the person with special needs, and for the family as a whole. They are the coordinators of care, the managers of appointments, the preventers of loneliness, and the makers of decisions even to the point of Power of Attorney. And they are so often people who themselves are burdened with their own health challenges and who may be in only marginally better health than the persons to whom they are providing family caregiving.
Dr. Gordon Atherley
Dr Gordon Atherley holds the British equivalent of the Canadian PhD and MD degrees, and LLD, Honoris Causa, from Canada’s Simon Fraser University. His awards include Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, UK. His medical specialties are occupational medicine and public health.
As first President and Chief Executive Officer of the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety, the Canadian equivalent of the US National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, he led the creation of Canada’s electronic information service in occupational health and safety, now used in more than 40 countries.
In academia, he held senior, tenured, full-time positions, including departmental chair, in university faculties of physics, engineering, and medicine. He is the author of a textbook and numerous articles and publications.
Since retiring from medical practice, he’s built up Greyhead Associates, which critically researches the safety, effectiveness and fairness of health services for persons with special needs.
Through Virtual Care International, a company of which he’s President, he’s involved in providing sensible technology to family caregivers to help them with their responsibilities, workloads, and concerns.
Now an activist, he urges family caregivers to unite because, more and more, it’s not just their families who depend on them, it’s also the healthcare system as a whole, as it struggles to meet more and more needs of more and more people.
