I know that crystal balls are in short supply but futurists like Jim Carroll do some interesting conjecturing of their own which in the end may prove to be just as predictive as any of the statistical projections that are being thrown our way these days.

Canadian futurist and consultant Jim Carroll says that the world is witnessing the birth of new careers overnight and that “half of what students learn in their first year of science courses in university will be obsolete by the time they graduate”. One recent Australian study suggests that 65% of pre-school children in that country will eventually work in occupations that do not yet exist. This obviously presents some problems as to how to predict future workforce needs not only in health care but in other areas as well.

In the medical field, he suggests that. It would take a physician 115 eight-hour days of reading just to keep up on the 3,600 articles published in 2004 on the treatment of heart disease.

Mr. Carroll believes that the future economy will be based on imparting and acquiring knowledge which is consistent with what other sources indicate but what is striking about his predictions is the number of career paths that newer generations will likely take in their lifetime.

Having a dozen or more careers will not be unusual for Generation Xers he predicts. They have the “shortest attention span in world history and they are bringing it into the workplace”. Many GenXers also believe according to Mr. Carroll, that self-employment is more secure than working for someone.

This will have huge repercussions for the delivery of health care, even if Mr. Carroll is only partially correct in his predictions.

With thousands of nurses and doctors scheduled to retire in the next decade, and aging boomers requiring medical and nursing care attached to modern expectations, new methods of attracting and retaining skilled health care workers will be required. It won’t be enough to have a top down approach and creating uncertainty in our health care system with painfully slow transformation won’t be a good strategy long term either. However, the need for dynamic change within health care will be essential.

How can a health care system change to meet modern requirements while providing the necessary dynamics to attract and retain new generations of health care workers?

Judging from their profile, the new generations of health care workers are likely to want more input at their places of employment and into the decision-making that affects their professional lives as well as a level of autonomy that may be greater than previous generations. If the transformation of health care fails to provide this, we risk losing them to other fields.

We already see this in primary care where the uncertainty of the future delivery of family medicine is a contributing factor to reduced interest in this profession. Relatively fewer medical school graduates are choosing family medicine which is undergoing significant change directed from the top down.

As Canada moves from an economy of labour surplus to one of labour shortage for the first time in living memory Kurtis Kitagawa, a principal research associate with the Conference Board of Canada, says “This is a brand new world. It’s a world we are in for the long term.”

And it is a world in which the ability to anticipate and adapt quickly will be needed more than ever before.