Healthcare in 2023: Getting Back to the Basics

Across Canada, the healthcare network is suffering. Hospital leadership and executives are evaluating the post-pandemic effects and are considering strategies to facilitate a return to a pre-pandemic status.  Is a return to “normal” in the best interest of the population?  

Healthcare professionals are exhausted, the rate of vacant positions continues to rise and, in some cases, waitlists continue to grow as access to care is still limited. The healthcare system was already stretched to the limit; the pandemic has stretched it beyond the breaking point. If we continue to operate in the same way, we cannot continue to expect different results. To increase hospital capacity and optimize access, we need to consider fundamental ways to offer gold-standard patient and family-centered care.

As challenging, as the pandemic was to navigate for healthcare professionals, there have been several lessons learned. Flexibility, adaptability, and agility are strengths that we embraced over the past 3 years, and these helped us get through very difficult times. 

We must strive to integrate some of these attributes into our new vision of healthcare.  The use of artificial intelligence became part of our regular discussions as well as innovative ways to provide care via telehealth. We learned how to optimize patient care outside of the hospital setting and reinforced the value of healthcare prevention. 

Most importantly, the pandemic highlighted the vital role our health professionals play, the value of teamwork, and the necessity to focus on retaining our expert staff as well as recruiting new professionals. How do we do that when we are experiencing the current health workforce crisis? As a priority, we need to recognize and validate the crucial work being done.

Although artificial intelligence and the utilization of information technology programs can enhance the patient experience and decrease the workload on healthcare professionals, we cannot minimize the necessity of a highly skilled workforce in healthcare. 

These professionals are at the core of healthcare. As we brace ourselves for the “great resignation” affecting the healthcare network across Canada, career opportunities and job vacancies will continue to increase. For our Canadian healthcare system to evolve into something better, our focus needs to be on reigniting employee engagement, recognizing, validating, and ensuring job satisfaction.  Healthcare professionals are passionate, empathetic, motivated, flexible, and ethically responsible. These values must be recognized, validated, and rewarded to continue to attract the best people.

Collecting data and feedback from the current front-line healthcare professionals using various methods are required to develop strategies and tactics to achieve our goals. It is important to empower our teams to influence decisions and participate in enhancing the work environment. The input received guides the creation of goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based (SMART). Performance indicators are identified to track the progress of our actions.    

As senior leaders, our wildly important goals for the upcoming years must concentrate on human resource stability, embracing professional growth and development, and rebuilding a sense of belonging within the workplace.  We need to ensure that our employees come to work happy and leave happy, feeling accomplished. Engaged and empowered employees are essential to delivering quality care and influencing patient outcomes. They are the essential foundation required to move towards a revolutionized healthcare system that is centered on both patient and staff engagement.