Oral health and Family Caregiving
January 18, 2011
Hosted by Dr. Gordon Atherley
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Guest Information
Episode Description
Mickey Wener and Mary Bertone are registered dental hygienists engaged in clinical programs at the University of Manitoba. Both have personal experience with family caregiving. They explain why good oral health is so important, how it links with general health, and what problems are created when it isn’t good. They discuss challenges created by poor oral health for persons who aren’t mobile enough to attend a clinic and who are being cared for by a family caregiver at home or in a residential facility. They describe services provided by dental hygienists, and how dental hygienists work with family caregivers in promoting good oral health. They explain how family caregivers can monitor the oral health of family members, and the techniques family caregivers can use to maintain family members’ oral health. They stress the importance of family caregivers and say what more they would like to see done to bring to promote more team work between dental hygienists and family caregivers.
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.
