There’s no app for healthcare staff shortages: opinion editorial

Abstract

Governments worldwide face significant healthcare staff shortages, driven in part by aging populations with greater health and long-term care needs. Digital technologies, including robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) supported systems, are frequently presented as the primary, or even sole, solution to this challenge. However, such technological solutionism is misguided. Technologies do not simply substitute for missing (or migrating) workers as labor. Rather, they enter into existing care relations and reshape care practices from within. As a result, they do not reduce workload so much as transform the tasks and routines that constitute healthcare work, as ethnographers have shown. Beyond the general value of ethnographic method, anthropologists are especially well positioned to illuminate what typically remains invisible in studies of technologies within healthcare organizations and thereby contribute to technological realism for better (health)care.