The First Collaborative International Resource Directory for Dementia, Minneapolis
October 15, 2012
Hosted by Dr. Gordon Atherley
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Guest Information
Episode Description
Lori La Bey is the founder of the First Collaborative International Resource Directory for Dementia, in Minneapolis. She describes her professional career and experience of family caregiving. She discusses family caregivers’ needs in caring for family members living with dementia such as Alzheimer’s disease, and explains what motivated her to create the Directory. She describes the services it provides, who it is intended to serve and where, and which of her other services it works with. She talks about the people who are involved in creating it, how it operates and whether she is looking for volunteers to get involved or for additional resources of any kind. She describes its users, and their needs and responses. She says why it is so important, who in the wider community should know about it, and why should they know about it. She explains how she wants it to work with healthcare and other professionals. She shares her message to family caregivers. www.AlzheimersSpeaks.com
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.
