“Dream grounds for a dream hospital”: in this promo film from 1950 about a model Kaiser hospital, we see babies being slid through walls in “drawer-like bassinets”, suited husbands smoking endless cigarettes awaiting their wives’ childbirth, and hospital rooms with sliding doors that open up to a terrace with a swimming pool. Not to mention the remote controlled doors, massive x-ray machines “imported from Holland at a cost of $25,000,” and patient records being transported through pneumatic tubes, so they’d “get to the doctor before the patient does!”

Visions about the future of hospitals nowadays look quite differently. Here’s a video from just a few years back about the El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, California – home of Google, LinkedIn and WhatsApp headquarters. It’s probably a little different from any hospitals you’ve worked in, with its robots navigating hospital halls and calling up elevators, smart beds which speak 22 languages and sound an alarm if a patient tries to get out of bed by himself, and “robotic lines” that automatically process and test blood samples. The biometric palm vein scanners to access patient records are already making headway in hospitals across the country though!

Which hospital would you rather work in? And how does your hospital compare? If you’re looking for a job in a hospital, you can find plenty of jobs on our website, but we can’t guarantee they all look quite like this!