Identity Theft and Vulnerable Family Members—What Family Caregivers Should Know
November 6, 2012
Hosted by Dr. Gordon Atherley
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Guest Information
Episode Description
Krista James is the National Director of the Canadian Centre for Elder Law, www.bcli.org. She describes her personal background, professional career, and her experience of family caregiving. She explains the Centre’s work. She discusses ‘Elder Law’ and how is it is used to protect seniors. She talks about the ways in which identity theft occurs and how it harms seniors and their families. She identifies the commonest ways in which a senior’s identity is stolen and the commonest types of harm that results to the senior and the senior’s family. She talks about ways for preventing theft of identities of seniors and what to do if a senior’s identity seems to have been stolen. She discusses increasing protections for seniors and improving help for family caregivers caring for family members vulnerable to identity theft. She shares her messages to governments and others concerned with elder law about improving protection of seniors against identity theft, and to family caregivers.
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.
