Human Rights for Family Caregivers and Family Members Living with FASD
March 24, 2015
Hosted by Dr. Gordon Atherley
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Guest Information
Episode Description
Jeff Noble is the Founder and CEO of Noble Initiatives 2014, http://fasdforever.com/, which provides hope and education to people caring for someone living with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD). He talks about his own experience of family caregiving for FASD, his on-line applications, and his work with his partner, Tara Soucie, providing training in the fundamentals of FASD. He identifies what he sees as the most challenging of the challenges to fairness that arise in the general community and in schools, and when individuals are not well enough to make decisions for themselves. He discusses help for overcoming the most challenging of the challenges to fairness for family caregivers and for their family members. He says what more he would like to do and see done to strengthen fairness for family caregivers and their family members. He says what role he sees for human rights commissions in strengthening fairness for family caregivers and their family members.
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.
