Community health centres, diverse communities and family caregiving
August 30, 2011
Hosted by Dr. Gordon Atherley
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Guest Information
Episode Description
Jack McCarthy is the Executive Director of the Somerset West Community Health Centre since 1989. The Centre provides comprehensive primary health care services targeted to the needs of residents in west central down town Ottawa. Dr Ahmed El-Zoeiby, who holds a PhD in microbiology, is a community pharmacist practicing in Ontario. They discuss their work and the types of communities they serve. They explain health promotion, illness prevention, and community wellbeing in relation to needs and family caregiving in the communities they serve. They discuss caregiver needs in faith-based, culture-based and immigrant communities. They describe family caregivers’ needs and ways to address these needs where a family member is living with a health condition for which there is no cure. They explain to family caregivers how community health centres and community pharmacists are helping meet the needs of family caregivers in the diverse communities, and say what more help they believe is needed.
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.
