Who are you going to be Jo(e)?

Are all nurses, psychologists, health and social care professionals in general frustrated would-be Joe 90s?

If you recall: courtesy of an incredible device called BIG RAT - Brain Impulse Galvanoscope Record And Transfer - Joe could benefit from the transferred knowledge and experience of experts in disparate fields. The literature is full to this day with commentaries on the transition from novice-to-expert practitioner. Enter Joe: our fictional character who could take a short-cut.

Fact may be catching up, not that nurse training departments will notice next year, but major strides are being made in understanding the relation of stimuli and neural activities across the cortex.

What I'm interested in though is Joe's briefcase. Bizarrely equipped for a nine-year old: packing gun and silencer. We readily take Joe and the entertaining premise of the show in our stride, but we trip-up when it comes to real child-soldiers. Of course, it is just fiction vs fact; a question of worlds-apart - North-South and East-West?

Joe's briefcase held the tools that he needed by virtue of the transferred knowledge and skills (for UK NHS readers you can imagine the Knowledge and Skills appraisal interview). Just think when the BIGRAT's job is done and Joe is spin-dizzy, the repertoire of tools will change. Some are generic, but others need to be specific to the new mission. Health professionals are dizzy with constant change and the world's citizenry struggle to keep up locally and globally.

So as your foot taps in time to Barry Gray's excellent theme music - what's in your briefcase today? What will you need tomorrow? What choice do our children have? What do they need in their briefcase to cope with the 21st Century?