Useful news and information from the health care community
A website that connects aged and disabled consumers with service providers.
Karista is pleased to announce we will be attending the Nepean Disability Expo at Exhibition Marquee, Penrith Panthers this coming Friday and Saturday 14th and 15th September.
Come and say hello and introduce yourself to our CEO, Danielle Bodinnar at stand C7 and learn about Karista, our wonderful service providers and how Karista can help you.
Jean Hailes for Women's Health is Australia's leading and most trusted women's health organisation and this week (3-7 September) they are celebrating Women's Health Week.
The aim of the week is to encourage women to take their own health seriously and seek advice from a health professional if they have any concerns.
As part of the week's celebrations, we asked Danielle Bodinnar Karista's CEO and Founder a few questions about her health and well being and how she manages as a busy working Mum.
Being a busy working Mum and founder of Karista, what are your top tips for looking after your health?
BYO lunches (healthy and cheap) and get home early enough to spend quality time with the family - it reduces stress and mothers guilt
How do you manage quality time with family and work?
I work very close to home (3 tram stops away) so I do not have to waste time commuting. My husband and I both start work early and finish early so we all (the four family members - dad, mum, 2 kids) spend time together at the end of the day - and share the end of the day chores i.e. feeding, cleaning and loving the kids
How do you unwind after a busy week at Karista?
Nice dinner on the couch with a good movie (or some fun junk TV)
At Karista, we know that its mostly women who arrange healthcare for their loved ones– do you have any advice for women needing help with an elderly family member?
Most of us in our old age do not want to accept help. Start to make your family member comfortable with it as early as you can. Introduce it slowly (eg. a cleaner) and find a carer organisation that you like and that can work to your parents preferences
The NDIS is complex and can be overwhelming, what advice do you have for families starting out on the NDIS journey?
It is difficult to avoid the stress. Finding a provider based on very specific needs can be difficult. Speak to as many experts as you can handle and take a balanced view. And feel free to call us on 1300 274 782
And finally, is there anything else you’d like to share for Women’s Health Week?
Yep, stay healthy, stay strong and Happy Women's Health Week!
Source: Jean Hailes for Women's Health
As many parents will attest, getting your kids to eat a wide variety of fruit and vegetables can be a challenge.
Gone are the days of 'You're not leaving the table until your plate is clean'. Now, dietitians and nutritionists recommend parents take a different, some may say kinder approach.
Recommendations include, introducing a rainbow of colours' to your child's diet and not to be discouraged if they reject something new first time around. It can take between 5 to 10 attempts before a child will eat a new fruit or vegetable.
Creativity can also be the key, cooking a stir fry? Why not use chopsticks? Perhaps make some pasta together and use vegetable juice to colour your dough. Creativity in the kitchen and at meal times is a great way to show children that meals do not have to follow the same routine.
University of Wollongong Senior Lecturer Yasmine Probst and PhD candidate Ruth Crowe have written an excellent article in The Conversation with ideas to help parents encourage their children to eat the rainbow.
This weekend, the Sunday Herald Sun will be including a special lift out dedicated to the NDIS.
Karista is pleased to say, we will have a half page ad within the lift out.
Check us out and don't forget to Search, Compare and Select!
This week marks Speech Pathology week (19th-25th August), a week celebrating and promoting the work of Speech Pathologists.
To mark this special week, Speech Pathology Australia have put together a list of tips to help you successfully communicate with your friends and family.
Source: Speech Pathology Australia
ABC aired a report last night (15/8/18) on 7:30 with Leigh Sales - about the residents of Blue Mountains residential facility, Uniting Springwood, who are helping to prepare meals for their local homeless community. Some of the residents also volunteer to serve meals.
An initiative of Uniting Springwood and Mama Lana's Community Foundation, this project has given the residents a renewed purpose and welcome feelings of achievement and giving. They really enjoyed the opportunity to be the givers of care rather than the ones always receiving care. The homeless community are delighted to be eating a home cooked meal with the opportunity to meet and thank those involved.
This program shows that everybody has something to contribute, especially our elderly. The residents of Uniting Springwood, like a lot of our elderly in residential care, have decades of cooking experience and other skills which are underutilised.
To see more of this heartwarming story, click the link below.
Source: ABC 7:30
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/the-aged-care-residents-cooking-for-the-homeless/10124714
Melbourne's Preston has recently seen the opening of Australia's first Indoor play gym designed specifically for children on the Autism Spectrum.
Sally Johnson, mother of Digby who is on the spectrum has bought the concept from the United States and says everyone is welcome to play at the center.
To see a recent story from Channel Nine News press the link below.
Source Channel 9 News and ABC Radio Melbourne
It seems that even cardiologists have found it difficult to sort the fads from the truth when it comes to the best foods for a healthy heart. Combined with minimal practical nutritional training at medical school, this gap in cardiologists knowledge prompted Dr Andrew Freeman to write a research paper for the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, guiding cardiologists in nutrition for their patients.
His aim was to find the answers to the most common of patients questions. To see what foods Dr Freeman recommends to keep your heart in tip top shape follow the link below:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/health/2018-07-24/which-foods-are-good-for-your-heart-health/10026910
Source: ABC and Journal of the American College of Cardiology
This week marks National Diabetes week, did you know that Diabetes is one of the 8 major chronic diseases Australians live with? A chronic disease is acknowledged as a long lasting condition with persistent effects and social and economic consequences.
If you are living with diabetes and need help at home please visit Karista to find services in your local area.
When you have diabetes, your body can't maintain healthy levels of glucose (a form of sugar) in the blood. For our bodies to work properly we need to convert glucose from food into energy. A hormone called insulin is essential for the conversion of glucose into energy. In people with diabetes, insulin is no longer produced in sufficient amounts. When people with diabetes eat glucose, which is in foods such as breads, cereals, fruit and starchy vegetables, legumes, milk, yoghurt and sweets, it can’t be converted into energy.
Instead of being turned into energy the glucose stays in the blood resulting in high blood glucose levels. After eating, the glucose is carried around your body by your blood; blood glucose level is called glycaemia. Blood glucose levels can be monitored and managed through self care and treatment.
Type 1 diabetes is an auto-immune condition in which the immune system is activated to destroy the cells in the pancreas which produce insulin. We don't know why this happens, Type 1 diabetes is not linked to lifestyle factors. There is no cure and it cannot be prevented.
Type 2 diabetes is a condition where the body becomes resistant to the normal effects of insulin and or gradually loses the capacity to produce enough insulin in the pancreas. We do not know what causes Type 2 diabetes but do know that lifestyle, genetics and family are related risk factors.
Gestational diabetes mellitus (sometimes referred to as GDM) is a form of diabetes that occurs during pregnancy. Most women will no longer have diabetes after the baby is born.
Gestational diabetes is the fastest growing type of diabetes in Australia, affecting thousands of pregnant women. Between 12% and 14% of pregnant women will develop gestational diabetes usually occurring around the 24th to 28th week of pregnancy. All pregnant women should be tested for gestational diabetes at 24-28 weeks of pregnancy (except those women who already have diabetes).
Source: Diabetes Australia and Australian Institute of Health and Welfare
If you are concerned that you or someone you care for may develop Diabetes, please see your GP for a check up.
If you're interested in reading more about the three main types of diabetes, a good place to start is Diabetes Australia website, or the Baker Institute
Karista if you are looking for support and services in your local area.
The talented people at Feros Care in Northern New South Wales have been researching innovative ways to work with Dementia patients. They've recognised living with Dementia can be a lonely and isolating experience. Thanks to their research they've discovered a fun and invigorating way to beat the loneliness and isolation. The solution? Silent Disco. No longer the domain of Millennials, a Silent Disco allows residents to dust off the dancing shoes and engage with their fellow residents in a new and meaningful way.
If you'd like to see the team at Feros Care Byron Bay in action, please click on the link to view the 60 Second Doc by the people at 60 Second Docs.
The annual Focus on Ability Short Film Festival is now showing. Running for 10 years, this festival asks film makers to 'Focus on the Ability' of people with a disability and tell a story from their world view. Film makers are as diverse as the disabilities they cover with winners from 2017 including first time film makers.
Check out the link below to see the 2018 finalists
https://www.focusonability.com.au/FOA/Films.html
It was 1988 when Betsey Farber found herself hacking through a dried-up nest of wild thyme in the backyard of a rental home in Provence. The scene was aromatic and picturesque, except for the pair of children’s scissors she’d stuffed her grown-up knuckles through. She couldn’t find anything better for the job. Who is going to leave their good kitchen tools in a rental? She had just finished disassembling an unbudging pepper grinder, soaking the rusted metal parts in a glass of Coca-Cola so she could season dinner.
Betsey and her husband, Sam, began to scour local hardware stores and weekend markets for better kitchen tools. But kitchen supply offerings were limited to slender, pointed, gripless products. What Betsey was hoping to find were more like the hand tools that New England Shakers had crafted a century before, with their beautifully and purposeful tactile handles. Sam, who had started a successful housewares business in 1960, began to plan a new line of kitchen tools with Betsey that would feel good, not just in her hand but in anyone’s hand. That was the genesis of the cooking tools and housewares company OXO, established in 1990.
Since then OXO has become a nearly universal example of universal design, a concept that strives to produce products and spaces accessible to everyone, disabled or not. It produces more that 1,000 products sold globally.
But in learning about Betsey and OXO, something caught my eye. This is from the OXO Blog: “Sam Farber founded OXO when he saw his wife, Betsey, having trouble holding her peeler due to arthritis. This got Sam thinking: Why do ordinary kitchen tools hurt your hands? Sam saw an opportunity to create more thoughtful cooking tools that would benefit all people (with or without arthritis) and promised Betsey he would make a better peeler.”
As a disabled designer, I have come to believe that products are a manifestation of relationships. Disabled people have long been integral to design processes, though we’re frequently viewed as “inspiration” rather than active participants. When I discovered Betsey was a talented architect in her own right, I began to wonder about her relationship to OXO. And so I reached out to ask.
When Betsey and I finally met, we quickly began doing exactly what my disabled friends and I do — we shared our life hacks, the creative ways we alter things to make them more accessible. I told her about the dancer and writer Jerron Herman who orders a pizza cutter with his waffle at the local diner, which works much better for him than a knife and fork, and Emily Ladau who uses kitchen tongs to extend her reach. Betsey told me about the time she wired the jar opener that was affixed to the bottom of her cabinet to a cheese grater so she could hold it in her hand. When Betsey and Sam sold OXO in 1996, the OXO Good Grips Jar Opener was their No. 2 product, second only to their peeler.
Our conversation left me wondering when a hack becomes more than a hack and turns into something of commercial value. And moreover, I wanted to know why these inventions aren’t routinely written into disability history.
Such stories reach back centuries and continue on to the present day, but they often go untold. For instance, you probably have not heard of Stephan Farffler, the Nuremberg-based watchmaker and paraplegic who in 1655 created what he called the manumotive carriage. Farffler accomplished two things with his invention; he created the first self-propelled wheelchair, and unbeknown to him, it became the precursor for the modern-day bicycle.
Today, the technologies we use often come from people like Wayne Westerman, who as an electrical engineering doctoral student at the University of Delaware in the late 1990s was experiencing symptoms of repetitive stress syndrome that interfered with his ability to study and work. With his adviser John Elias, he went on to help develop touch-screen technologies and establish a company called FingerWorks, which would pave the way for the tablet and cellphone revolution that shapes most of our lives today. If you are reading this piece on your phone right now, you may want to thank Westerman. Steve Jobs bought FingerWorks in 2005, and it led to the iPhone touch screen.
These stories exemplify what it means to be an original lifehacker; our unique experiences and insights enable us to use what’s available to make things accessible. Yet, despite this history of creating elegant solutions for ourselves, our contributions are often overshadowed or misrepresented, favoring instead a story with a savior as its protagonist.
This was the case with OXO. “The general understanding,” Betsey told me, “was of the brilliance and kindness of Sam who made these tools for his poor crippled wife so she could function in the kitchen. I will probably go down in history as having arthritis rather than having the conceptual idea of making these comfortable for your hand.”
This predominant narrative that disabled people are only recipients of design has managed to embed itself into our language. The phrase “design for disability” yields many more Google search results than “disability design.” OXO may think its handle fixes us, but I see the lack of attribution as the disabling issue.
When people like Betsey take credit for their contributions, it allows someone like me to take ownership of mine. This is how we attract disabled people to design.
Betsey now lives in what she calls an elder community. A group of designers recently asked her and a few of her neighbors to test a gripping tool prototype. As Betsey was trying it out, she thought of her OXO Jar Opener and told the designers, “You know, if you put the grip on one side instead of both, it will be lighter and more efficient.” They took her advice. I asked Betsey if they had any idea who she was. Laughing, she said no.
It is my hope that they know now, and that one day everyone will know what we do.
Liz Jackson is the founder of The Disabled List, a disability design self-advocacy organization, and WITH, a fellowship that helps match creative disabled people with design studios and other organizations.
Have you or your loved ones had trouble navigating what a Home Care Package (HCP) is?
Freedom Aged Care has created an easy guide to help you understand how to apply, what is included and the difference between other aged care packages.
Check out the new Karista explainer video....
“Aged-care sector gets $1.6 billion to assist older Australians with services in their own homes”
The budget provides $1.6 billion over four years for 14,000 people to stay in their homes rather than nursing homes.
"Just because you're getting older does not mean you should surrender your dignity or your choices," Treasurer Scott Morrison said.
The funding boost means close to 74,000 people will be able to access home care packages by mid-2022.
The sector has been arguing for up to 25,000 extra places to deal with the backlog of people either waiting or using packages that do not have the full range of services they need.
A Government loans scheme to allow older people to borrow against some of the equity in their home will be extended.
That is an indication that older people will be expected to be prepared to cover some of the costs of living longer themselves, as well as relying on Government funding packages.
Therapy robots are an accessible option for caregivers who are busy assisting others but could use their own care.
Source: The Guardian
Most days, Jillian Bohac feels overwhelmed. After her husband was hit by a truck while riding his bike, he suffered a brain injury that produced so many clots, she says, that it “looked like a night sky” on the CT scan. Once the most independent man she knew, he now needs help putting on his shoes. Bohac, a social worker, is now a full-time caregiver for her husband. “I’ve gained weight, lost all my friends, have anxiety – I’m a mess,” she says. “My focus is him, 100%. As a social worker, you’d think I’d know better, but it sneaks up on you, the self-neglect. You’re aware you have needs, too, but it just doesn’t work out that way.” When asked if there are enough supports out there for family caregivers, she is adamant that there are not.
Bohac is not an outlier. As of 2012, according to Statistics Canada, over 8 million Canadians provided care to a chronically ill or disabled friend or loved one. The country has an ageing demographic and an increasing number of long-stay home-care patients, so the number of older people in Canada who could need the assistance of caregivers, informal and professional, is growing. Many caregivers say they don’t have money to hire private care or a support network. For those in the middle of their careers who can’t afford to quit, government-funded programs that provide caregivers help from nurses and personal support workers become increasingly important. But those resources aren’t always immediately accessible to caregivers, and the system can be backlogged, depending on the area where a patient lives.
Tess is a mental health chatbot. If you’re experiencing a panic attack in the middle of the day or want to vent or need to talk things out before going to sleep, you can connect with her through an instant-messaging app, such as Facebook Messenger (or, if you don’t have an internet connection, just text a phone number), and Tess will reply immediately. She’s the brainchild of Michiel Rauws, the founder of X2 AI, an artificial-intelligence startup in Silicon Valley. The company’s mission is to use AI to provide affordable and on-demand mental health support. Rauws’s own struggles with chronic illness as a teenager brought on a depression that led him to seek help from a psychologist. In learning to manage his depression, he found himself able to coach friends and family who were going through their own difficulties. It became clear to him that lots of people wanted help but, for a number of reasons, couldn’t access it. After working at IBM – where he worked with state-of-the-art AI – Rauws had his “aha” moment: if he could create a chatbot smart enough to think like a therapist and able to hold its own in a conversation, he could help thousands of people at once and relieve some of the wait times for mental health care.
It was precisely that potential that caught the attention of Saint Elizabeth Health Care. A Canadian non-profit that primarily delivers health care to people in their own homes, Saint Elizabeth recently approved Tess as a part of its caregiver in the workplace program and will be offering the chatbot as a free service for staffers. This is the first Canadian health care organization to partner with Tess and the first time that Tess is being trained to work with caregivers specifically. “Caregivers are really great at providing care. But they are challenged at accepting care or asking for help,” says Mary Lou Ackerman, vice president of innovation with Saint Elizabeth Health Care. And there’s no doubt that many need support, given the high rates of distress, anger and depression. Caregivers often juggle their duties with their careers and personal responsibilities. The mental planning can take its toll. They might be in charge of, for example, organizing rides to appointments, making sure their spouse is safe when they run out to get their medications, clearing snow from the wheelchair ramp and checking their spouse does not fall while going to the bathroom at night.
To provide caregivers with appropriate coping mechanisms, Tess first needed to learn about their emotional needs. In her month-long pilot with the facility, she exchanged over 12,000 text messages with 34 Saint Elizabeth employees. The personal support workers, nurses and therapists that helped train Tess would talk to her about what their week was like, if they lost a patient, what kind of things were troubling them at home – things you might tell your therapist. If Tess gave them a response that wasn’t helpful, they would tell her, and she would remember her mistake. Then her algorithm would correct itself to provide a better reply for next time.
One of the things that makes Tess different from many other chatbots is that she doesn’t use pre-selected responses. From the moment you start talking, she’s analyzing you, and her system is designed to react to shifting information. Tell Tess you prefer red wine and you can’t stand your co-worker Bill, and she’ll remember. She might even refer back to things you have told her. “One of the major benefits of therapy is feeling understood,” says Shanthy Edward, a clinical psychologist. “And so if a machine is not really reflecting that understanding, you’re missing a fundamental component of the benefits of therapy.”
In your very first exchange with her, Tess will make an educated guess – drawing on the other conversations she has had with people and with the help of algorithms – about which form of therapy might be most effective. That doesn’t mean she’s always right. If her attempted treatment – say, cognitive behavioural therapy – turns out to be wrong, she’ll switch to another one, such as compassion-focused therapy. How does Tess know when she’s wrong? Simple: she asks. “Tess will follow up on issues the user mentioned before or check in with the patient to see if they followed through on the new behaviour the user said they were going to try out,” says Rauws.
Tess’s great value is accessibility. Many caregivers found Tess convenient to talk with because she could be reached at any time – something they don’t have a lot of. “Caregivers say they can’t get out of their home. They’re so boggled with so many things to do,” says Theresa Marie Hughson, a former shelter worker who had to retire from her job three years ago to care for her relatives, including her husband, who suffered from chronic pain for over 19 years before passing in July. Hughson, who’s from St John, New Brunswick, says that when she was really burned out from caring for her husband, she tried to use a mental-health service for seniors offered by the province. It took a month for her to get her first appointment. “There was nobody there when I was really having a struggle coping,” says Hughson.
It may be some time before we integrate chatbots fully into regular care. While she is trained to act like a therapist, Tess is not a substitute for a real one. She’s more of a partner. If, when chatting with her, she senses that your situation has become more critical – through trigger words or language that she has been programmed to look for – she will connect you with a human therapist. In other cases, she might provide you with the resources to find one. That said, many caregivers who chatted with Tess said they felt more comfortable opening up to her precisely because they knew she was a robot and thus would not judge them. Julie Carpenter, a leading US expert on human-robot social interaction, cautions against overestimating the effectiveness of mental-health algorithms. “I think we can come really far with AI as a tool in psychological therapy,” she says. “However, my personal opinion is that AI will never truly understand the subjective experience of a human because it’s not a human.”
Carpenter suggests that we have to recognize that chatbots are machines, despite their increasing sophistication. They do what we tell them to do. They think how we teach them to think. How well we reflect, and act, on what we learn about ourselves – what scares us, what calms us down – is largely up to us.
Ability Fest made its debut in Melbourne over the weekend, and the all-inclusive party has raised nearly $200,000 to help kids with disabilities across the country. See Article - click below:
A recent article in The Age detailed that lower back pain is the leading cause of disability worldwide. One in two Australians experienced it in the past month - see link above to read.