Salvation Army Lawson Ministries Advocating for Adults with Developmental Disabilities and Supporting their Families

June 24, 2013
Hosted by Dr. Gordon Atherley

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Guest Information

Episode Description

Lisa Schumph is Program Manager,www.lawsonministries.org, in Hamilton, Ontario. She talks about her personal story, her work with the Ministries, and the Ministries’ work. She explains the developmental disabilities of the adults they support and the challenges that they and their families experience. She highlight the challenges to their quality of life and hope. She describes the supports provided by the Ministries to the adults, to their families, and to all of them to support their quality of life and to bring them hope. She says what more she wants to do and see done through the Ministries to help adults with developmental disabilities and to support their families. She explains what she wants to see done by healthcare and social systems to help to help adults with developmental disabilities and to support their families. She shares her message for adults who live with developmental disabilities and for their families.

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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