Nurses and Family Caregivers Caring for Young People with Mental Health Problems
April 7, 2014
Hosted by Dr. Gordon Atherley
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Guest Information
Episode Description
Shauna Johnston, RN, BScN, BSc, originally from Cape Breton Island, is a Mental Health and Addictions nurse with the Mississauga Halton Community Care Access Centre, www.healthcareathome.ca/mh . She talks about her career, personal experience of family caregiving, and her work with the Centre. She highlights the types of mental health problems she meets. She explains the challenges that mental health problems create for young people and their family caregivers. She discusses the challenges, including privacy restrictions, in communicating with young people who are experiencing mental health problems, with their families, and with others. For the challenges, she highlights the responses that are effective. She says what more she would like to see done to help with the challenges encountered by young people and their family caregivers. She shares her message for family caregivers and their young family members about the role of nurses in caring for young people with mental health problems.
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.
