Home Training for Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders
July 7, 2014
Hosted by Dr. Gordon Atherley
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Guest Information
Episode Description
Jeff Noble is Founder and CEO of ‘Noble Initiatives 2014’, that through presentations and online applications, http://fasdforever.com/, provides hope and education to people caring for someone living with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD). He talks about his own career and life with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and about his becoming the foster parent of a young man with a FASD, and how this changed his own life. He discusses the challenges that FASD creates for family caregivers caring for children, teenagers, and adults. He explains how his training programs help family caregivers caring at home for family members overcome the challenges they experience with FASD their family members are living with. He says what more he would like to do and see done by healthcare and social systems to help in the training of family caregivers. He shares his message for family caregivers embedded in his slogan ‘FASD is forever, frustration is not’.
Family Caregivers Unite!
Archives Available on VoiceAmerica Variety Channel
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.
