Family Caregivers for Family Members Living with Schizophrenia
October 6, 2015
Hosted by Dr. Gordon Atherley
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Guest Information
Episode Description
Dr. Penny MacCourt, pennymaccourt@shaw.ca, works with older adults and their families in community, long-term care and acute-care settings. She explains the Mental Health Commission of Canada and the Family Caregiver Advisory Committee, and how their purposes relate to adults living with schizophrenia and to their families and their service providers. She describes her consulting across Canada with adults living with mental health challenges, and with their families and service providers. She shares her impressions of their experiences. She identifies the most challenging of the challenges for adults living with serious mental health conditions, such as schizophrenia, and for their families and their service providers. She describes what she see as the most promising ways of overcoming these. She says what more she would like to see done to promote the most promising ways of coping with the challenges. She comments on the value of archiving Episodes of Schizophrenia Community Radio.
Family Caregivers Unite!
Archives Available on VoiceAmerica Variety Channel
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.
