HEALTH WORKER MIGRATION

Health Worker Migration

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Health Worker Migration

Introduction

Health worker migration between and within countries is an increasing concern because it has a significant impact on health systems in both developed and developing countries. Decisions regarding policies require to be made at all levels such as international, regional and national in order to manage this occurrence effectively. However, such decisions will only be effective when implemented correctly and assessed solely on the basis of adequate statistical data. On the other hand, a large amount of statistical data on health workers migration is neither comparable nor complete, as well as underuse, provide only limited or broad description of the phenomenon and not based on real-time as needed. Hence, there is a conflict arises between the poor statistical evidence and the broad range of potential data sources on the health workers migration. Researchers identified a key issue who want to study migration of health workers, such as to what extent health worker migration will be regulated.

Discussion

Health workers, human resources for health, health personnel and health workforce are used interchangeably. Health workers are individuals who are trained in the field related to health such as health planners, ambulance drivers, health policy analyst and medical statisticians.

In the United States, there was a rapid increase in the number of overseas-educated doctors who get employment and work permit to work in US as a medical doctors, during 2001 to 2008 this figure raised by 70 percent (Aiken, 2007:1299-1320). During same era, temporary doctor migration has raised two-fold in Australia and in Canada by 40 percent. In Australia and Canada, permanent migration laws and regulations for doctors have been trouble-free; thereby, flows have been swiftly increasing. With the long-term permits, foreign doctors' inflows have also raised notably in Switzerland (during 2001 to 2008, with an increase and decrease of 70 percent), in Germany. On the other hand, the number of foreign-trained doctors who are newly registered was continuously declining in UK by the year 2003, when it hit the highest point of 14,000. However, about 5,000 new registrations were evidenced in the year 2008. Despite decline statistics, UK is still among the second largest destination country subsequent to US for foreign-trained doctors (Bueno de Mesquita & Gordon, 2005: 4-64).

There is no doubt that the migration of health workers is a growing phenomenon; however, it is debatable that to what extent a country or globe will regulate migration of health workers. There are number of factors that need to be considered while addressing this issue. Some of them are as follows:

The migration of health workers has a significant effect on quality of health care, service provisions and staff distribution across countries and administrative units. The extent of health workers migration has increased mainly because of globalization; the health workers migration has become a significant issue and addresses on priority basis on GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Service) that deals with the temporary people movement travels from one country to another to ...