Caring for Schizophrenia: Questions for the New Government of Canada
November 17, 2015
Hosted by Dr. Gordon Atherley
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Guest Information
Episode Description
Florence Budden is a mental health nurse and nursing instructor at the Centre for Nursing Studies in St. John's Newfoundland. Ryan Clarke, a lawyer, founded Advocacy Solutions, a business providing a voice to organizations and individuals through the development and implementation of impactful advocacy strategies. They outline their careers and their work especially as it relates to mental health. They identify what they see as the main challenges faced by individuals living with schizophrenia and by their families and family caregivers when they become involved with governments, using criminal justice systems and access to medications as examples. They discuss the ways in Canada a national organization devoted to schizophrenia could help overcome the challenges. They say how they would like to phrase questions for the new federal Health Minister to ensure that the Schizophrenia Society of Canada is recognized as Canada’s national organization devoted to schizophrenia.
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.
