You Have Come a Long Way Babies
March 3, 2014
Hosted by Dr. Gordon Atherley
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Guest Information
Episode Description
In August of 2003, Mariana Bracic, a successful career lawyer, found herself at the end of her parental leave with her twins. Also in 2003, she opened MBC Legal, www.mbclegal.ca, an employment law firm and, subsequently, MBC Information Solutions Inc., a legal information company. She talks about her legal career up to the point at which she went on parental leave, and the early period of her life as family caregiver for the twins. She explains what decided her to set up her own law firm. She discusses the challenges she experienced in setting up and running her own law-firm and her legal information business. She explains the challenges for her and her husband in family caregiving for the twins, and the ways they both confronted and overcame the challenges. She says what she would like to do and to see done by employers and others and to help families make decisions when both spouses work and parental leave is coming to an end. Her babies are the twins, the family and the business.
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.
