Eaton, J;
Baingana, F;
Abdulaziz, M;
Obindo, T;
Skuse, D;
Jenkins, R;
(2023)
The negative impact of global health worker migration, and how it can be addressed.
Public Health
, 225
pp. 254-257.
10.1016/j.puhe.2023.09.014.
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Abstract
International migration of healthcare workers is well established and has become a means of maintaining service quality in many high income countries. In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in recruitment of health personnel who have been trained abroad, including from the poorest countries in the world. In this article, using General Medical Council (GMC) data, we chart the growth in numbers of international staff working in the United Kingdom, where since 2018, over half of all new GMC registrations have been of doctors trained abroad. There is evidence that this migration of health staff results in poorer health service provision in low and middle income countries, as well as substantial economic impacts in these countries that have invested in training their health workforce. Recruiting governments have argued that remittances compensate for the loss of personnel, and that training opportunities can enable skills transfer to countries with weaker health systems. However, we found that the costs to the source countries dwarfed remittances, and that only a tiny fraction of people who move to take up posts in wealthier countries ever return to their countries of origin to work. We conclude that in addition to the investment in health systems (and workforce development) in low and middle income countries as part of Official Development Assistance for Health, there is an urgent need to increase training of nurses and doctors so that damaging migration is no longer relied upon to fill gaps in healthcare personnel.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | The negative impact of global health worker migration, and how it can be addressed |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1016/j.puhe.2023.09.014 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhe.2023.09.014 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of The Royal Society for Public Health. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). |
| Keywords: | Human resources for health, Low- and middle-income countries, Health workforce, Global health, Health Services |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > UCL GOS Institute of Child Health UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > UCL GOS Institute of Child Health > Population, Policy and Practice Dept |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10181978 |
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