How healthcare leaders can create new opportunities and improve their workforce

We are seeing an evolution of demographic changes amongst societies globally – people are living longer than ever before, but at the same time, having fewer children. As the world’s population will for the first time in recent history enter a decline, new workforce strategies have to replace current ones. But what does this aging population mean for healthcare? To discuss how healthcare leaders can adapt to this new transformation and the changes in societal and workplace norms, we sat down with Bradley Schurman to get his insight. He is the founder and CEO of The Super Age, a firm focused on helping organizations understand and harness opportunities to demographic changes, with a focus on population aging. In his recently published book “The Super Age: Decoding Our Demographic Destiny” Bradley helps explain the coming Super Age and what it means for our collective future. The Super Age era and the healthcare industry Bradley Schurman: The Super Age is a novel period in human history when many of the world’s populations will be going over a tipping point where one out of five people will be over the age of 65. Because there will be more older people in the population, we’ll have to adapt some of our norms to meet them where they are. We typically don’t look at the fact that this actually caused the global population to quadruple in size from about 2 billion people roughly in 1900 to just shy of 8 billion people today.2 As we began to globalize, this explosion caused increases in the pool of labor all over the world, especially in the US and Europe. It’s coming, and this will require us to have new workforce strategies. HT: How will the “Super Age” and the ongoing demographic changes challenge and influence the future of healthcare? Bradley Schurman: Within healthcare, there are some pretty dramatic changes that will happen relatively soon. The first and probably most prevalent is that we’ll have to address some challenges that we have towards treating older people within the healthcare system, particularly focused on the end of life. Focusing on the end of life, there will just be a significant increase in the number of older people that doctors, nurses, and healthcare staff will have to consider in later life.