Support for Family Caregivers in Diverse Communities
December 16, 2013
Hosted by Dr. Gordon Atherley
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Guest Information
Episode Description
Rabia Khedr is Executive Director of the Canadian Association of Muslims with Disabilities, a board member of the Federation of Muslim Women and the Ontario Women's Health Network. She has her own company, www.diversityworx.com/. She talks about her life, career, work and experience of family caregiving. She describes the challenges experienced by family caregivers in diverse communities caring for aging parents or for children and young adults who have serious health problems. She highlights the challenges the family caregivers experience. She explains how the family caregivers overcome their challenges and describes the help they need in caring for family members and for themselves. She says what she wants to do and see done by healthcare and social systems to provide more help for the family caregivers. She shares her message for family caregivers in diverse communities who are just starting out on the road of family caregiving for family members with serious health problems.
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.
