Immigrants and Refugees Trying to Fit In
November 11, 2013
Hosted by Dr. Gordon Atherley
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Guest Information
Episode Description
Rubin Friedman, born in a displaced persons (DP) camp in Linz, Austria, grew up in Toronto, Canada. Most recently he was appointed to the Board of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation and served as its Principal Operating Officer. He talks about his life as the child of an immigrant family. He describes his experience of fitting in and what fitting in meant to him. He explains his adult-life work as an author of several books, rubinathome@gmail.com. He discusses the challenges encountered in the course of fitting in by adults as individuals, by families, and by children. He explains the help needed by adults, families, and children to overcome the challenges they encounter in the course of fitting in. He says what more he would like to do to provide help through his work as an author, and to see done by social systems and community organizations. He shares his message for families and their children who are just starting out on their journey of fitting in.
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.
