Principles of Personal Health Information Privacy for Persons living with HIV/AIDS

July 14, 2015
Hosted by Dr. Gordon Atherley

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Guest Information

Episode Description

Micheal Vonn, lawyer and Policy Director of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, https://bccla.org/, describes her work as it relates to HIV/AIDS. She says what privacy means, how privacy differs from confidentiality, why it’s important to distinguish between privacy and confidentiality, and what’s meant by personal health information and personal information as it relates to men, women and children living with HIV/AIDS. She identifies what she sees as the challenges to privacy created by record systems used by healthcare services, by social services, and by public health services in their work of advancing the health of the public. She explains what she sees as the key principles for protecting the human rights, for privacy laws and for public health services. She says what more she would like to do and see done, and by whom, to strengthen respect for the key principles. She comments on the value of archiving discussions for the HIV/AIDS community.

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.



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