A week of meetings with clinicians, patient associations, institutions, universities and research centers, designed to imagine together the next evolutions of Italian healthcare. It is Johnson & Johnson Week ‘Together towards the medicine of the future’, which opens today. The first day, we read in a note, focuses on the presentation of a study by Altems – Alta Scuola di Economia e Management dei Sistemi sanità, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, a national point of reference for research and innovation in healthcare – promoted by Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine, on the issues of the training mismatch of healthcare professionals. There are 3 new professions of the future indicated by Altems: innovation manager, healthcare director 4.0 and patient journey manager.
How should healthcare professionals’ skills evolve to best overcome the challenges of a constantly evolving healthcare system? How equipped do today’s students, who will be future healthcare professionals, feel? These are the questions that the Altems study tries to answer starting from 2 words: managerial skills and hybridization. Today, managing the healthcare process requires managerial skills not only for directors of clinical centers, but for all healthcare professionals, who are called upon to develop a managerial mindset to address the complexity of the system and contribute to its sustainability. Similarly, the analysis confirmed how the healthcare world is experiencing an irreversible path towards multidisciplinarity and contamination with disciplines of various kinds. On these aspects, Italian students feel unprepared. Specifically, in the comparison between the importance attributed to skills by private and public companies, revealed by the students’ self-assessment, the greatest misalignment is in skills such as planning, business organization, business planning and logical-analytical skills.
“From the analysis we conducted – explains Federica Morandi, director of Academic Programs and Research at Altems – it clearly emerges that the world of education is facing a watershed with the past: today there is an ever-increasing awareness of the need to combine hard skills, understood as technical skills, with behavioral skills, related to knowing how to be, which are essential to respond to the phenomena of hybridization and managerialism that will increasingly affect the sector. However, these skills are those in which there is a high mismatch compared to what students learn today, making rapid intervention necessary to integrate degree courses in this sense. It is an issue that must be addressed decisively today, because the interventions that could realistically be implemented will produce their effects no earlier than ten years”.
There is no doubt that the challenge for the current training system is both on technical knowledge and on the creation of a different mindset for future healthcare workers, which enables them to promptly and effectively follow the trends that innovation and technology bring to their work, both in terms of processes and services and of actual roles, which are still embryonic or non-existent today. Of these, Altems identifies 3 in particular: the innovation manager, the healthcare director 4.0 and the patient journey manager. These are figures that have a lot to do with the management of innovation, so that it really reaches patients, and is managed in the best and most efficient way in everyday work; with the managerial approach to everything that is health and healthcare, increasingly leveraging technological and process innovation; with taking charge of the patient throughout his or her treatment path, streamlining the phases of the disease, the needs of the different members of the multidisciplinary care team, and home-hospital continuity in a single management flow.
“The study – underlines Americo Cicchetti, Director General of Health Planning, Ministry of Health – shines a spotlight on the importance of creating a change of pace in training in the health sector to ensure that students’ skills are as broad and varied as possible, allowing them to respond concretely to the needs of a constantly evolving health system. It is more than appropriate to open a discussion on how to support our system in this sense by setting up a working table that sees a broad involvement of all the interlocutors in the health and training sector, with the aim of identifying the common evolutionary guidelines of study paths in the health sector”.
As Graziano Onder, coordinator of the technical-scientific secretariat of the Presidency of the Istituto Superiore di Sanità, observes, “we are living in a moment of great evolution, in which the ability to orient oneself between different disciplines represents an everyday reality. The medical profession must know how to evolve its role to be an active part of this change and, in this sense, a fundamental contribution can be given by the next generations of doctors. In this context, the role of training is central to knowing how to grasp and overcome the challenge of a stronger, more innovative health system capable of responding to the renewed needs of society”.
In this context, “the research presented today – comments Francesca Galli, Director of the Cabinet Office, Technical Secretariat of the Minister, Ministry of University and Research – raises an important issue for the skills of tomorrow and offers important ideas to reflect on to ensure that the world of education and health are in tune, building degree courses that are increasingly able to respond to the challenges of the future. The Mur has long been making a concrete commitment to ensuring that the educational offering at university level is always in step with the needs of both the world of public administration and the private sector, contributing to the personal and professional development of students”.
In this regard, Mario Sturion, Managing Director of Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine Italia, states: “We are very proud to open our week of meetings ‘Together towards the medicine of the future’ today by presenting the interesting study by Altems. This event, and the entire Johnson & Johnson Week, want to be a testimony to the change we have undertaken as a company through the recent rebranding: a true declaration of intent, a commitment to the future and a tribute to our 138-year corporate history, which best expresses the sense of responsibility in responding – together with our partners – to the new challenges of future health. Among these, the theme of the skills to be built today for a more equitable, modern and efficient health system – he concludes – is more relevant than ever and we are certain that this study sheds light on the direction in which to go for the benefit of all patients”.
#Week #Medicine #Future #Kicks #Professions #Altems
