Seniors Supporting Seniors
April 19, 2011
Hosted by Dr. Gordon Atherley
[Download MP3] [itunes] [Bookmark Episode]
Guest Information
Episode Description
Barbara Burnett is Executive Director, Community Management, with Seniors For Seniors. She describes her career, her work and her experience with family caregiving. She discusses the challenges for seniors, and explains what makes these so challenging. She describes how seniors’ support helps seniors and their family caregivers meet the challenges involved in living at home, living a long way away, or living in long-term care facilities. She talks about aging at home and tell us how well the needs of seniors are communicated to healthcare planners from programs like these, and what she sees as ways of improving these communications. She explains how well or otherwise the needs of seniors are generally understood and what she sees as ways of improving understanding of key needs, such as those in culture-based, faith-based and immigrant communities. She tells us what she would like to see done to enable more seniors to bring more help to seniors and family caregivers caring for them.
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.
