Canada is on the verge of a silver tsunami, and our health-care sector isn’t ready.
The rapid aging of our population through the 2020s is about to strain our hospitals, clinics and long-term care facilities, and technology will bridge only part of the gap. As much hope and hype as we see in robotic caregivers, virtual physicians and wearable sensors, we’ll need more humans in health care, and more human skills than ever.
The past decade has shown how reliant health care is on skilled labour; it’s been one of the fastest-growing sectors for employment, and shows no signs of letting up. A new report from RBC estimates only 17 per cent of health-care jobs are at significant risk of automation, compared with 34 per cent in the overall economy. Indeed, the sector will need an extra 370,000 workers and professionals over the next five years.
That presents an opportunity for governments and employers worried about job displacement in the 2020s. Hospitals and homes will need not only more people, as advanced technologies improve, they’ll need more of the human skills — communications, collaboration, critical thinking — that have always been central to health care and can be found in abundance in other sectors.
According to the RBC report, Paging Dr. Data, health care can provide a career path for one million Canadians who are currently at risk of losing their jobs to automation. That doesn’t mean a retail clerk can become a brain surgeon, but there will be plenty of new positions in health care that will need the basic skills that are common to other disrupted sectors. Think about the truck driver who can become a paramedic, or retail worker who can become a co-ordinator in a busy outpatient clinic.
The sector may also see a surge in demand for the digital and data skills that are in short supply everywhere, which poses a problem for a sector that still relies on fax machines. Take artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. They offer strong potential to predict disease, but for those technologies to be effective, medical practitioners first need to understand the underlying algorithms — and their limits — and then work with patients and fellow care workers to ensure the predictions are put to proper use. New kind of health-care teams will be needed, with data analytics at their core.
As a demographic crisis comes at us, we can’t wait for the market to play out at its own pace. We urgently need a national skills agenda for health care, knowing it will take years to get right. The earliest baby boomers turned 73 this year, and are still a decade away from the average age at which people start to need long-term care. But by 2030, caring for seniors will consume 55 per cent of provincial health-care budgets, up from 45 per cent now.
A thoughtful skills agenda needs to break down the barriers that keep so many digital and data specialists from seeking careers in health care. A slow speed to innovate, insufficient capital budgets and limited space for entrepreneurs are chasing talent away. Our report calls for the creation and expansion of second-career bridge programs, such as second-entry nursing programs, to attract professionals into health care without requiring years of additional schooling.
A new focus on work-integrated learning for students from non-health schools, to expose a diversity of students to the sector, is also an idea worth pursuing.
We will also need a more thoughtful approach to life-long learning, to help displaced workers from other sectors develop some of the entry-level skills they’d need to get good jobs in health care. Professional bodies, unions and educators have an opportunity to build those bridges, which will take a new willingness to experiment and innovate in collaboration with each other.
The health-care sector also has the opportunity to learn from other sectors already in the throes of a skills revolution, and share its own discoveries with the rest of the country. The experience of banks with blockchain or retailers with predictive analytics can help health-care planners map out the skills they’ll need, just as the health sector’s experience with robotics can inform other sectors moving quickly to an IOT (internet of things) world where every electronic device will have the power to make decisions.
Canada is moving into the 2020s with a strong skills strategy but we need to continue to build on it. That includes a concerted effort to help address the challenges and opportunities facing our healthcare sector. Properly designed, this mix of technology, skills and innovative management can soften the landfall of the silver tsunami, and further prevent the cresting cost of health care from overwhelming government budgets. In this new machine age, our society’s health will depend on it.
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