Global Healthcare Worker Migration

Abstract

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Please check back later for the full article. The global migration of healthcare workers is one of the most widely studied issues in healthcare worldwide. Fueled by a global shortage of healthcare workers, this movement is considered a crisis in health sector human resources. Since the 1970’s, the need for skilled healthcare workers has increased in wealthy countries that have not been able to keep up with training and retaining enough labor force to fill demands and that have increasingly relied on foreign-trained healthcare workers. Migrants are motivated by push factors in their home countries and pull factors in receiving countries. While some countries are capitalizing on the market demand and are facilitating export of their workers, some poor countries that lost their skilled workers to more developed countries are concerned with brain drain. Private, for-profit recruitment firms are increasingly entering this market and shaping migration patterns. A general consensus of research in this field is that more work needs to be done globally to build the capacity for training healthcare workers, to increase recruitment and retention of healthcare workers in their local regions, and to manage the global movement of healthcare workers of their own accord.

Exploration of Estimated Emigration Trends of Polish Health Professionals

“…Due to the significant shortage of health care personnel in Poland, this article focuses on the quantitative issues describing this phenomenon of emigration of health care personnel from this country in relation to the main professional groups and the estimated trends that have accompanied them in the last dozen or so years. By analysing the origins of emigration in Poland, one can state that they are quite typical for countries of similar or lower economic status [ 12 ]. Low salaries seem to be quite an obvious reason to emigrate.…”

Social networks and skilled health worker migration in Nigeria: An ego network analysis

“…3 Due to the globalisation of healthcare labour markets, there is a consensus that governments worldwide should focus on improving the governance of SHW migration in countries with critical workforce shortages, rather than prevent SHWs from migrating altogether. 4 In this light, migration governance has been defined as norms, laws, procedures, and organisational structures that regulate or facilitate state and non-state actors' response to migration. 5 In Nigeria, a Migration Governance Framework (MGF) exist to guide oversight functions related to migration practices.…”

Factors Affecting Migration Intentions of Polish Physiotherapists and Students of Physiotherapy—A Cross-Sectional Study

“…Factors affecting the decision to migrate include individual motivations, working conditions, economic circumstances in the home and destination country, legal frameworks and policy instruments. As a result of the migration of educated medical staff, the source country also incurs losses resulting from the loss of capital invested in the education process of future employees [ 9 , 10 ]. It shows a need to develop the tools to track the flows of healthcare professionals because no country can disregard health workers’ mobility or consider itself “safe” [ 5 ].…”