James Paterek explains that anyone who has spent time in healthcare knows the workforce never stands still. New technologies arrive, patient populations shift, clinical roles expand, and each generation of professionals brings its own expectations. Over the coming decade, those forces are likely to change not only who delivers care, but how, where, and alongside whom that care happens. For organizations responsible for building healthcare teams, the challenge is to plan for that future while still filling today’s vacancies.
Demographics Are Setting the Agenda
The single largest force shaping the next decade is demographic. As the U.S. population ages, James Paterek, Chief Executive Officer of Millbrook Support Services, Inc., expects healthcare systems to face steadily growing demand for services tied to chronic disease, rehabilitation, behavioral health, long-term care, and other conditions that call for ongoing rather than episodic treatment.
That shift changes the staffing math. Episodic care can be scheduled and staffed in bursts. Ongoing care requires consistent, sustained coverage, often across multiple settings and over long periods. Organizations that plan only for today’s open position may find themselves perpetually behind a demand curve that was visible years in advance.
A Workforce in Transition
The people delivering care are changing just as quickly as the patients receiving it. Experienced professionals are retiring, and younger clinicians are entering the field with different priorities. James Paterek points out that organizations now face a dual task: preserving the institutional knowledge that walks out the door with each retirement while creating workplaces that reflect what the incoming generation actually wants.
Flexibility, career development, access to modern technology, organizational culture, and meaningful work have become central to the employment conversation. These are no longer perks to be negotiated at the margins. For many healthcare professionals, they are the deciding factors in where they choose to work and how long they choose to stay.
Rethinking the Care Team
The traditional boundaries between healthcare roles are also loosening. Jim Paterek anticipates that tomorrow’s care teams will lean more heavily on multidisciplinary models that bring physicians together with advanced practice providers, nurses, pharmacists, behavioral health professionals, allied health professionals, care coordinators, and other specialists.
Each team member plays a distinct role, but together they allow a health system to deploy clinical expertise more efficiently and respond to increasingly complex patient needs. For workforce planners, the question becomes less about filling a single job title and more about assembling the right combination of skills around the patient.
Care Is Leaving the Building
Where healthcare professionals work is changing too. Virtual care has already shown that an episode of care doesn’t have to begin and end inside a traditional facility. Over the next ten years, telehealth, remote monitoring, mobile technologies, and hybrid care models may let providers support patients across much greater distances and maintain stronger connections between appointments.
James Paterek sees this as both an opportunity and a planning challenge. It expands the reach of a limited workforce, but it also requires organizations to rethink licensure, scheduling, technology support, and the kind of professional who thrives in a hybrid environment.
What Artificial Intelligence Changes, and What It Doesn’t
Artificial intelligence adds another layer to this transformation. AI can take on documentation, administrative workflows, scheduling, data analysis, and many other tasks that currently consume a disproportionate share of a clinician’s day.
In James Paterek’s view, the most meaningful question is not whether technology will replace healthcare workers. It is how technology will change the work that humans are asked to do. As routine processes become more automated, the distinctly human capabilities become more valuable, not less. Communication, empathy, adaptability, leadership, judgment, and the ability to earn a patient’s trust will remain essential no matter how sophisticated the tools become.
Taking the Longer View
For organizations that build healthcare workforces, these converging changes demand a longer horizon. Recruiting cannot be purely reactive. Leaders also need to consider which skills will matter most in the years ahead, how professionals will want to work, and how staffing models can adapt as care delivery continues to evolve.
At Millbrook Support Services, preparing for the future of healthcare starts with understanding the people who will deliver it. Supporting healthcare organizations means responding to immediate workforce needs while staying attentive to the larger trends reshaping providers, patients, and care itself.
“The healthcare workforce ten years from now will not look exactly like the workforce we know today,” says James L. Paterek, CEO of Millbrook Support Services. “Our responsibility is to anticipate that change and continue finding ways to connect talented healthcare professionals with the communities and organizations that need them.”
No one can predict precisely what healthcare will look like in 2035. The direction, however, is already clear: care is becoming more connected, more technologically enabled, and increasingly multidisciplinary. James Paterek believes the organizations preparing for those realities today will be the ones best equipped to build the workforce healthcare will need tomorrow.
James L. Paterek is the Chief Executive Officer of Millbrook Support Services, a nationwide healthcare staffing and workforce solutions company with offices throughout the U.S. Millbrook, a Joint Commission–certified and Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB), supplies physicians, nurses, advanced practice providers, and allied health professionals to government, education, corrections, and commercial clients across North America. Millbrook is also a GSA-Federal Supply Schedule (FSS) 621 I contract holder for Professional & Allied Healthcare Staffing Services, with coverage across all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.
