Living Safely at Home
August 24, 2010
Hosted by Dr. Gordon Atherley
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Guest Information
Episode Description
Haley Samuelson and Bill Archer talk about their respective projects, LivingWell@Home and MonAmiCaregiving. Both projects involve technology designed for living safely at home. Haley and Bill talk about living at home as the preferred option for more and more persons who rely on family caregiving. They explain their projects. They recognize that, for family caregivers, safety in the home is a big concern especially when the family member is alone any part of the day or night. They illustrate from their experience the impressive benefits that technology can bring to family caregiving. They explain the importance of privacy. They explore the concerns that family caregivers sometimes have about technology. They discuss the challenges for home safety viewed from the perspective of persons living at home, of their family caregivers, and of the designers of the technology. They explore the challenges of costs of technology and say what they would like to see done to reduce these.
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.
