Family Caregiving and Aging at Home
July 10, 2012
Hosted by Dr. Gordon Atherley
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Guest Information
Episode Description
Lucie Shaw and her husband David own and operate Nurse Next Door in Mississauga, Ontario. She explains why they decided to go into the business and how personal experience of family caregiving influenced them. She describes how she and her team work with family caregivers. She explains what home actually means in ‘aging at home’. She highlights the needs of family caregivers and the challenges they face in caring for family members aging at home, and for the family members they’re caring for, and identifies the services and solutions for needs of families in the various home arrangements. She describes the ways in which she sees family caregivers’ needs evolving as more and more of them care for family members aging at home. She says how she thinks the healthcare and social systems should enhance the support they provide for family caregivers caring for a family member aging at home. She gives her message for family caregivers caring for a family member aging at home.
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.
