Tools for Family Caregivers for Assessing Care Needs of their Family Members
June 3, 2013
Hosted by Dr. Gordon Atherley
[Download MP3] [itunes] [Bookmark Episode]
Guest Information
Episode Description
Amy MacFarlane is Founder and CEO of www.recrespite.com. She shares her personal story, talks about Recreational Respite, and explains needs for tools she sees among the family caregivers. She describes the tools she thinks would help family caregivers assess needs of their family members, that would help them assess the usefulness of services for their family members, and that would them assess the usefulness of services to help family caregivers themselves. She discusses development of tools, and how family caregivers can be assured that tools are likely to be useful. She says what tools she would like to see developed first and what more she wants done to provide tools that are truly helpful for family caregivers caring for family members at home and for those for whom caring at home is not an option. She shares her message to families and family caregivers who are caring for family members with health conditions that have no medical cure.
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.
