The world is short on health-care workers. In 2016, the World Health Organization (WHO) predicted a global shortfall of 10 million health workers of all types by 2030. In 2020, the global health workforce numbered 65 million, according to the WHO’s National Health Workforce Accounts, yet these workers are no match for the demand. As the population in high-income countries gets older and lives longer, and as institutions fail to train enough new workers, the gap between demand and supply has remained. People are also exiting the health-care workforce, due to factors including aging, insufficient educational spaces, and worker burnout; physicians and nurses are retiring without a ready supply of replacements. This was a problem prior to the COVID-19 pandemic but has persisted since the global public-health crisis arrived. The American Medical Association (AMA) stated that two in five U.S. physicians surveyed in 2022 were planning to leave the profession by 2027.
When unable to source staff at home, wealthy countries such as the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Saudi Arabia tend to turn abroad. The AMA, for instance, identifies better legal pathways for international medical graduates as the first way to relieve shortages, while Germany’s Triple Win program is designed to recruit thousands of foreign-born nurses. The number of migrant doctors working in mostly high-income countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) increased by 50 percent from 2006 to 2016, to nearly 500,000, while the number of migrant nurses increased by 20 percent from 2011 to 2016, to nearly 550,000. In 2020, more than 12 percent of all nurses globally were working in a country other than that of their birth, according to the WHO. In the United States, one-quarter of practicing physicians were trained abroad as of this writing, according to the AMA.
This trend has a mix of impacts for health-care workers’ countries of origin. While emigration can advance individuals’ careers and drive economic development through the money workers send back, countries’ domestic health-care workforces may become depleted. In places such as the Philippines, training schemes have shifted to suit the needs of international markets rather than local conditions.
This article examines the trends in international migration among health-care workers. It focuses on major countries of destination and origin, factors driving migration, and global efforts to regulate the movement and prevent shortages in source countries.
Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story @ Article: Aging Societies Rely on Immigrant Health-.. | migrationpolicy.org
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