Family Feuding
October 4, 2011
Hosted by Dr. Gordon Atherley
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Guest Information
Episode Description
Audrey Miller is the founder and Managing Director of Elder Caring Inc. Dr. Renee Ruiter-Kohn provides various services including individual case management, interpersonal counselling and vocational counselling. Both have personal experience of family caregiving. They describe their work and the services they provide for families where feuding is a problem. They explain the ways in which feuding develops in families, and how it affects members of families such as immediate family caregivers and their siblings, children of parents in their declining years, and parents of children with severe and incurable medical conditions. They discuss the challenges that cause family feuding and, using their own personal experience and the insights they’ve gained from their professional work, talk about steps to prevent feuding from occurring and what to do when it does occur. They share their ‘wish list’ of things that they advocate for families to reduce the risks of family feuding.
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.
