Gordon Whitehead

Gordon Whitehead was first diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis in 1976. At that time he was a serving diplomat in the Canadian Foreign Service and he found that confronting and treating his disease proved particularly challenging when moving to and from places such as Islamabad, New Delhi, London, Bonn, Warsaw and other locales where treatments were sometimes inaccessible or at a remove from Canadian norms. He served in a wide variety of positions in External Affairs, latterly that of Director of Programmes for Europe, which embraced responsibility for Canadian academic, cultural and scientific exchanges with Western and Eastern Europe. He was also on the official Canadian Delegations to formal meetings on Cultural Exchanges and Human Rights, held under the auspices of the Helsinki Accords.

A native of British Columbia, Gordon moved back to the Province when he became Director of Immigration Policy for the Government of BC in 1992. In 1994, he was appointed as a judge on the Immigration and Refugee Board in Vancouver, a position he retired from in 2002 .

Because of career demands and a peripatetic lifestyle, Gordon is a late entrant to the domain of volunteer work and arthritis advocacy. In 2003, he joined "Patient Partners in Arthritis" --- an organisation that does demonstrations of musculoskeketal examinations to health care providers and he is now Vancouver Site Co-Coordinator for that organisation. He has since become a member of CAPA (Canadian Arthritis Patient Alliance) and he is now attached to the Planning Committee for the upcoming Ottawa Summit on Standards of Arthritis Care. He is greatly enjoying his work with the Consumer Advisory Board of the Arthritis Research Centre of Canada. Gordon believes strongly that we Canadians have both the collective will and the capacity to make the Canadian Health Care system the best and most responsive in the world for persons afflicted with arthritis and other chronic conditions.