Peace Ranch Supportive Housing and Rehabilitation for Adults Living with Mental Illnesses
December 2, 2013
Hosted by Dr. Gordon Atherley
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Guest Information
Episode Description
Eric Tripp-McKay is the Executive Director of Peace Ranch, Caledon, Ontario, Canada, http://www.peaceranch.com/. He’s worked in the community mental health sector for 25 years. He talks about his life, career and experience of family caregiving. He describes Peace Ranch, its mission and work. He discusses the mental ill-health that Peace Ranch addresses and the challenges that it creates for persons living with it and for their families and family caregivers. He highlights challenges that the mental ill-health creates for healthcare and social systems. He explains the ways Peace Ranch helps to addresses the challenges. He says what more he would like to do through his work as Executive Director, Peace Ranch, and to see done by the healthcare and social systems to provide more help to meet the challenges that mental ill-health creates. He shares his message for family caregivers just starting out on their journey of caring for a family member living with the mental ill-health.
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.
