Moving a Health System to Recognize all the People Working in it including Family Caregivers
September 2, 2013
Hosted by Dr. Gordon Atherley
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Guest Information
Episode Description
Dr. Adalsteinn Brown is the Director of the Institute for Health Policy, Management and Evaluation and the Dalla Lana Chair in Public Health Policy at the University of Toronto. He holds an undergraduate degree in government from Harvard University and a doctorate from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He talks about his life and career, explains his university work with healthcare systems, and highlights his commentaries on family caregiving,www.ow.ly/oi2r4 , The Day We Stop Caring PDF. He discusses the challenges perceived by family caregivers, such as blame, marginalization and lack recognition, as identified by The Mental Healthcare Commission of Canada’s Guidelines for family caregiving. He proposes steps to address these perceptions, says what more he wants to do through his university work in public health and see done by healthcare systems, and shares his message for family caregivers who are caring for family members with serious illnesses.
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.
