Timing! My wife and I were chatting with our Millennial niece & nephew over dinner last night. Both in healthcare. Both devoted to caring for their patients. Both seeing very serious signs that healthcare workers and healthcare upper management are not in the same book, never mind the same page. Both suffering from increased workloads due to reduced staffing, which management feels no urgency to fix. Both want to stay in healthcare, even though they see a crisis coming, because if they don’t stick it out, who is going to take care of their patients? But if they do stick, who is taking care of them?
Having switched career paths a few times in my life due to external forces, I made the pitch for them to look at alternatives on their own, while they can. Turned out this was something they were already thinking about. (They’re smart people.)
Upper management out there seem still convinced that if their workers leave, there are always replacements available; certainly this comes through in their policies that emphasize profits over people. Demographics say this is no longer the case, and will only get worse. I have no clue what the crisis will look like or when it will trigger, but there is one coming (and AI ain’t gonna fix it!).