Editorial | Leveraging the skills of older people

Confronting a worsening coronavirus epidemic and a shortage of medical professionals, the Government last week appealed to retired doctors and nurses for help in providing healthcare, including the delivery of COVID-19 vaccines to Jamaicans.

“With the surge in COVID-19 cases and hospitalisation, the health system ... needs your support as we work our way through this pandemic,” says a health ministry notice circulated last week by the minister, Christopher Tufton, on his social media accounts.

But it is not only the health sector that is under stress from the COVID-19 pandemic. Earlier in the summer, the education ministry, too, called for help from retired teachers with classes to lift the grades of tens of thousands of students who fell behind when in-class teaching was suspended because of the pandemic. These include more than 120,000 students who totally dropped off the education radar.

There is no public accounting of how many teachers took up Minister Fayval Williams’ invitation, and it is too early to gauge the response of doctors and nurses to Dr Tufton’s appeal. But the Government’s request is an opportunity for a discussion of Jamaica’s demographic trajectory, the island’s labour market, and the place of older workers in it.

For while the effects of the pandemic drove the decisions to seek out retirees, the shortage of skills the initiative highlights transcends the immediate crisis. Jamaica is critically short of skills. Indeed, a statistic often quoted by people who analyse Jamaica’s economy is that up to 70 per cent of Jamaican workers have no specific training or certification for the jobs that they perform. At the same time, Jamaica, unless something turns dramatically in the near term, is on the cusp of profound demographic changes. The trigger: Jamaica is becoming grayer, posing questions of whether, or at what point, the country can afford to retire older workers, especially those with specialist skills.

USEFUL CASE STUDY

The problem in the health sector is a useful case study of the difficulty of developing and retaining skills. Even before the pandemic, the island was severely short of nurses. It had around one nurse for every 1,000 inhabitants. In Britain, there are nearly eight per 1,000. It is even higher in the United States. In highlighting the impact of the nursing shortage in recent strategy documents, Jamaica’s health ministry reported that it had only enough nurses to cover 56 per cent of critical care beds in the island’s hospitals. It needed 1,000 additional staff to close the gap. The explosion of COVID-19 cases would have exacerbated that crisis.

Indeed, according to Minister Tufton, this year alone, the public healthcare system has lost over 400 nurses, or around eight per cent of its staff. They were mostly poached by recruiters from Britain, the United States, and Canada, where nurses are in high demand, the pay and the working conditions substantially better than in Jamaica. This recruitment is not likely to end anytime soon. The US government has, for instance, projected that its demand for nurses will grow by at least seven per cent annually over the next half a decade or longer. In Britain, the National Health Service says it has 50,000 too few nurses. Young Jamaican doctors, too, emigrate for better career opportunities.

It is, however, not only in healthcare that foreign recruiters looked for the best Jamaican talent. In the early to mid-2000s, Britain and some US states were hiring the island’s top-tier teachers. In many other industries, skilled professionals are also leaving, even if on their own steam.

TRAIN MORE PEOPLE

One possible solution, as this newspaper has previously posited, may be for Jamaica to just train more people, taking into account the likelihood of emigration. However, capacity and costs need to, experts say, produce sufficient skilled professionals fast enough to meet domestic needs as well as for ’export’.

This is part of the context in which the merit, or otherwise, of keeping older talent in the workforce longer should be part of the discussion about Jamaica’s economic future. For while Jamaica’s working-age population (people age 15 to 64) is, based on official projections, now at its zenith – with an ability to drive economic productivity and growth – declining fertility rates have stagnated population growth. The upshot: gray Jamaicans will soon be growing faster than any other demographic group.

“Jamaica continues to move towards the advanced stage of the demographic transition, a direct consequence of transitioning from high to low fertility and mortality rates,” the Planning Institute of Jamaica noted in its Economic and Social Survey for 2020, published this year. “The 0–14 age group has been declining while the working-age group (15–64 years) and the dependent elderly (65-plus years) have been increasing.”

The bottom line is that over the next two decades, the population of people who have reached the age to retire (people over 60 now account for nearly 14 per cent of the population) will not only be spiralling upwards, there will be an increasingly smaller active workforce to carry the burden of the retirees. The problem is likely to be evident even faster in economies with too few skills, and older, talented people, who are healthier and living longer, are forced to leave the workforce while still in their intellectual prime.

Increasingly, studies in developed countries are busting assumptions that older workers are less intellectually nimble and/or have less to contribute to economies than younger ones. Indeed, most studies show that a mix of the acumen and skills of older and young people working together enhances productivity and economic outcomes. That would seem to us even truer in countries like Jamaica, where trained and skilled workers are in short supply.