Migration of Healthcare Workers: Why Does it Happen?
One of the most critical challenges that healthcare systems face is a shortage of healthcare professionals. These shortages are usually rooted in a lack of resources that prevents the training or retraining of sufficient numbers of nurses, physicians or other healthcare workers.
The globalization of the labor market for healthcare workers has major implications for individual practitioners, for healthcare systems, and for governments. Some of these implications are positive, including the opportunities for nurses and physicians to improve their professional and personal lives and for developed countries to address the shortages of RNs and MDs they face. There are also significant negative consequences, primarily the drain this represents on the ability of less affluent countries to provide adequate healthcare for their citizens.
Here are the causes of migration of healthcare workers?
SUPPLY-PUSH FACTORS are those issues and conditions that cause healthcare workers to be dissatisfied with their work and careers in their home country, such as poor compensation, working and living conditions or career opportunities. These push factors may be present in some developed countries, causing healthcare worker to leave one developed country for another. However, these factors are present in a much more dramatic way in developing countries, and they contribute significantly to the decision by doctors and nurses in these countries to emigrate. Workers who are satisfied with their new employment situation, and thus unmoved by push factors, are unlikely to leave their home countries.
DEMAND-PULL FACTORS are the conditions in destination countries that motivate workers to migrate. Like push factors, pull factors can cause workers in one developed country to move to another developed country. However, the pull factors present in developed countries are more powerful influence on individuals in developing countries. As with push factors, healthcare professionals are unlikely to migrate to a destination country unless they perceive conditions there as superior to those at home.
THE ROLE OF HISTORICAL TIES are not the sole agents shaping the patterns of health worker migration. Relationships among governments clearly constrain the extent to which free-market forces operate and individual contracts are executed. Many critics of existing migration trends view the patterns as simply another manifestation of systematic neo-colonial exploitation. In some cases former colonial powers are actively involved in setting educational and training standards in former colonies, and the type of training received is relatively adaptable to meet the needs of the destination country.
There is a tremendous need for more research on healthcare migration. The scale and nature of skills shortages in the healthcare sectors, especially in rich countries, is poorly understood, as is the relationship between recruitment and retention. Sorting out challenges of geographical distribution versus those posed by scarce supply will continue to be important.
Published at: 07/04/2015
