In this episode, an audio extract of Lucien Engelen’s lecture at the Majlis Mohammed bin Zayed in November 2024, discusses the future of healthcare delivery. We examine the healthcare crisis marked by workforce shortages and systemic pressures. Lucien presents innovative views on how technology and retail integration can transform healthcare, highlighting that interventions make up only 6% of health outcomes while consuming 90% of budgets. We explore solutions like self-measurement kiosks and digital humans and discuss preventive health’s economic implications. This episode is crucial for healthcare professionals, policymakers, technologists, and anyone interested in healthcare’s future.

In this posting, I argue that training doctors and nurses separately can be problematic, leading to challenges in teamwork, communication, and understanding each other's roles. It outlines six key reasons why separate training is problematic: it reinforces role silos, hinders communication, creates a lack of understanding of each other's roles, inhibits patient-centred care, increases the risk of errors, and creates a barrier to healthcare system improvements. The excerpt then highlights the benefits of interprofessional education (IPE), where doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals train together on shared competencies, leading to enhanced collaborative skills and better preparedness for a more cohesive, effective, and responsive healthcare system.

Recent studies challenge the notion of radical life extension, suggesting we may be approaching biological limits. Analysis of mortality rates from 1990-2019 shows a slowdown in life expectancy growth across most populations. Only South Korea and Hong Kong briefly achieved the 0.3-year annual increase considered 'radical'. Experts estimate less than 15% of females and 5% of males may reach 100 years old this century without significant breakthroughs in aging biology. However, hope remains in emerging fields like geroscience and AI. As humans have historically overcome limits, the quest for extended lifespans continues, balancing scientific skepticism with technological optimism.