NEW TRENDS OF HEALTH WORKER MIGRATION. CASE OF ROMANIA

Abstract

The chronic shortage of workers in the health care field in countries all over the world has severe consequences for their population and implications spilling over far beyond their borders. At global level, according to the report Migration of Health Workers from 2014, there were about 60 million workers in the health care field, but distributed unevenly among countries and regions. The total number of health workers is still unable to satisfy the demands of many populations regarding access to the required health care services. Thus, both developed countries and developing countries struggle to meet the huge challenges triggered by the imbalance between the increasing demand of medical services and the supply of medical personnel within the health care systems. The migration abroad of the medical personnel from Romania has complex motivations and displays an increasing trend for the last decade, and this deepens the structural crisis within the public health care system. “Brain exodus” of Romanian professionals trained in the health care field might cause severe economic damage, especially when the education system is incapable of replacing those who left abroad. The paper intends a brief analysis of the dimensions and structure of the migration flows of medical personnel from Romania, in an European context.

Keywords

• physicians
• nurses
• health sector
• health workers migration