I'm a person who prefers to listen so that I can learn. (I am also a rabid reader for the same reason.) Yet I can’t deny that I also enjoy the opportunity to think through an issue and then excite others about what I've come up with. In this vein, I often present recommendations to our board, suggest alternative scenarios for our staff to consider, and provoke audiences I’m addressing to embrace new or different ways of thinking and problem solving. Over the fall months, I've spent a fair amount of time standing at podiums around the country, talking about my sense for where environmental health is heading. As my thoughts on this topic are the product of a significant amount of study … and listening … I thought I’d devote this column to telling you what I've been telling various environmental health audiences for these last several months. I hope you find the following discussion to be both thought provoking and helpful. In particular, I see at least six future visions for our profession:
1. Environmental health will move into big data while inspector and even mid level (skilled)-type jobs will be lost to sensor, automation, and simulation technologies. Think about it. We have carbon monoxide sensors in our homes, tire pressure sensors in our cars, toxic substances sensors on our air pollution control equipment, and so on. It isn’t that far of a jump to think about temperature, microbe, and visual sensors in our restaurants, food manufacturing facilities, and food processing centers, especially if this leads to significant cost savings for our employers, which is arguably the mantra of our times. I also anticipate that computer simulations will increasingly complement, supplement, and even replace our analyses of problems and situations. If software can already provide medical diagnoses and legal research, why can’t it also provide guidance on how to conduct an investigation of a foodborne illness outbreak? (A recent study from Oxford University calculates that 47% of the total U.S. employment could be replaced by computers.)
A more promising corollary to this notion is that well-trained environmental health professionals will be moving more into big data analysis as their jobs will focus more on what the data mean rather than on data collection. Moreover, as we develop the capabilities to accomplish interoperability across our database systems, we’ll have available to us mountains of environmental and health data that can be analyzed for correlations, trends, and cause-effect relationships. This is where the expertise that we have can really come into play as we can look (with the help of pattern recognition algorithms) for patterns in the data to inform us as to where environmental, enforcement, education, or policy interventions would seem most appropriate to protect the public’s health.
2. Our employment will increasingly become less a function of the education and experience that we bring to our jobs and more a function of the extent to which we develop ourselves through continuing education. This is a subject that I have passionately written about in previous editorials. Many of you are administrators. You know how rapidly the agenda for our profession is changing. From the emergence of a new food safety infrastructure, to new and emerging pathogens, to unpredictable emergencies, to the impact of social media on our work, no tomorrow looks like yesterday. day. The velocity of globalization and the IT revolution is such that we desperately need more than ever before employees who are motivated to keep pace.
The old understanding that hard work and playing by the rules will safeguard your job is quietly being replaced with the new understanding that to keep your jobs you have to work harder and smarter and learn and relearn faster than ever before. Another aspect to this trend merits a word or two. Historically, workforces have been able to institutionalize work practices through the power of unions and collective bargaining agreements. It is of note that the share of today’s workforce that belongs to unions has fallen to a 97-year low at 11.3%. In 1916, it was 11.2%. This downward slide is evident in unions representing both private- and public-sector employees. As many of you know, legislatures in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Indiana have now enacted right-to-work legislation that prohibits requiring employees at unionized workplaces to pay union dues. Union membership in Wisconsin fell by 13% and in Indiana by 18% in the year after these laws were passed. Weaker unions suggest less resistance for cash-starved employers to implement the very kinds of changes I've been describing.
3. The personal health care system will become a source of
funding for environmental health while governmental funding will continue to
decline. The Affordable Care Act has put into motion the largest wave of
hospital mergers in over 20 years. As the health care system transitions into
these big box enterprises called affordable care organizations (ACOs), opportunities
for new funding for environmental health from these ACOs will emerge just as
government funding for our work will continue to decline. I say that because the
financial incentives within the system are changing from being paid to provide
services to being paid for keeping populations healthy. ACOs will contract with
public and environmental health to prevent serious and expensive health
problems from developing because it will be in their financial best interests
to do so. The amount of new funding that we can secure will depend, however, on
our ability to change the perception of environmental health from being a
discipline that deals with contaminants in our air, water, and food to a
discipline that can be seen as a protector of a community’s health.
4. The millennials and their values will come to
increasingly shape and define the workplace. Get ready for the millennials! The
values of Generation Y will increasingly come to dominate workplace cultures,
especially in the use of social media in work, IT in general, and workplace
norms that are likely to become more oriented toward personal happiness, participation
in decision making, relationships, causes, and even short-term job commitments.
We are today witnessing the largest transfer of human capital in human history.
From now until 2030, every eight seconds, someone will turn 65. By 2015, there
will be more Gen X-ers and Y-ers in the workforce than baby boomers. In just
11.5 years, millennials will constitute 75% of the workforce! That workforce
will function differently than today’s workforce.
5. More and more of our work will migrate to apps. An
extraordinary offshoot of the IT revolution involves the astounding rise of
both mobiles and apps. Cisco predicts that by the end of this year, the number
of mobile-connected devices will exceed the number of people on earth and
global mobile traffic will increase 13-fold by 2017! And we haven’t seen
anything yet.
Attachable devices that turn you into a mobile device are now
coming out of laboratories. The whole definition of mobile is changing from a
handheld device to you. In any case, increasing amounts of all of our work will
be carried out through apps on mobiles.
6. Environmental health will evolve to embrace such
contemporary topics as health effects of global climate change, sustainability,
healthy communities, built environments, and smart growth, to name just a few. Watch
for core jobs in traditional areas of environmental health to continue to
disappear, in part due to the impact of the IT revolution and in part due to
the emergence of post-recession new financial norms now taking root across all
governments. New job opportunities for environmental health will emerge,
however, in contemporary topics such as sustainability, the built environment,
health effects of global climate change, and healthy communities.
Students coming out of environmental health programs are
passionate about working in these topic areas. At the same time, policy makers
are committing new dollars to fund work for these concerns. Environmental
health brings a specialized expertise to the table that in tandem with the
expertise offered by other professions makes for a powerful community response
to these urgent issues. Success on this one front has the potential for transforming
this profession from one that is in decline to one that has promising opportunities
before it.
In Closing
When I give presentations, I talk to my audiences through
the device of text polls. In the case of these six predictions, I’ve asked my
audiences if they either mainly agree or mainly disagree with me. It has been
fascinating to consistently see results that by margins of about 10–1, environmental
health professionals of all stripes are in accord with all or most of these
predictions.
How about you? I’d love to hear if you also see a future of
this nature. You can join the conversation by accessing my blog posting at
http://neha-org.blogspot.com/
and expressing your opinion.
This is our future … your future. What do you think? Same
old same old, something new and adventurous, or something in between? Let’s
listen together to what our community has to say about this!
Nelson Fabian
Executive Director
