Inclusion Networking
March 6, 2012
Hosted by Dr. Gordon Atherley
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Guest Information
Episode Description
Judith Snow, MA, is a social innovator and an advocate for inclusion communities that welcome participation by a wide diversity of people. She describes her career and life’s work as an artist. She explains what inclusion is, what brought her to believe in it, and how she uses art to advance it. She says what inclusion values, and who it creates value for. She describes the opportunities it brings, and explains their value. She identifies challenges that inclusion confronts, says why family caregivers should be interested in it, and explains what it means for children with special needs. She talks about communications for strengthening inclusion. She describes the play that’s been written about her. She says what needs to be done to improve understanding of inclusion. She tell us what more she wants to see done to promote inclusion for children and adults and their family caregivers. She gives us her message for family caregivers. Her work is shown at www.judithsnow.org.
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.
