7. Exploring and designing the future of healthcare talent management in a post-pandemic world

This workshop seeks to enable participants to autonomously approach complex, real-world health system problems – such as post-pandemic healthcare talent management - through engagement in a collaborative, future-oriented design jam.

  

Participants will: Learn about the fields of design thinking and foresight; Understand how the design thinking process connects to the phases of LEADS framework, the field of patient engagement, and quality improvement; and Collaboratively engage with others to envision a future of healthcare talent management and how to practically approach the transformation of the health system to realize said future. 

 

Activities and methods 

We will have an initial overview presentation about the fields of design thinking and foresight. We will then use the Mentimeter platform to facilitate audience interaction. Prompt questions will be solution-focused and future-oriented. Participant answers, as collected in real-time by Mentimeter, will be populated into a Three Horizons foresight framework. We will conclude by explaining the broader implications of foresight on systems transformation, and field questions from the audience. 

 

Outcomes/Results (talk about practical applications) 

At the end of the session, the group will have created an initial vision about the desired future of healthcare talent management, and a framework to get there. Participants may use the generated vision to inform their organization’s work, or they may be inspired to repeat/modify the process used in the workshop to build a vision that is more suited to their organization’s context and patient population. We will provide a virtual starter kit of foresight resources. The process of going through a case study will offer extrapolations about other contexts in which participants can use participatory foresight or design thinking (e.g. program or service redesign, high-level organizational strategic planning). 

 

Conclusion 

Improve problem solving capability in a persistently volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment and integrate best practices within real world context. While the challenges of the future may change drastically, design thinking processes and foresight tools can be leveraged to account for these unknowns to support the resilience of solutions to complex problems. 

 

Leadership lessons learned 

The participatory foresight workshop aims: to inspire leaders to look beyond ‘quick fixes’ towards foresight and systems; to reinforce the LEADS domains by connecting leaders to a new field which may be highly beneficial but unfamiliar; and to encourage partnership with stakeholders from diverse levels, backgrounds, and organizations. 

 

System changes 

The health system is currently experiencing huge stressors and challenges, and they cannot be addressed solely from within the health system. Such deep-reaching system transformation will rely upon a multi-sector approach. There is a lot about these problems that are ‘unknown’ because the circumstances or conditions have yet to fully arrive; foresight as a discipline is versatile enough to embrace the ambiguity and the unknowns to fulsomely explore the possibilities of ‘the future’ with an audience from any sector, and human-centred design thinking can be used to keep people and their needs at the heart of all innovation, development, approaches, and systems.  

 

Facilitators:

Trisha MacLeod - Commanding Officer, 2 Field Ambulance, Canadian Forces Health Services    

Julia Kowal - Family Engagement Coordinator, Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital