Critical review of the use of financial incentives in solving health professionals' brain drain

Adetola Akinto

doi:10.20525/ijrbs.v10i4.1202

Abstract

This study critically reviewed the use of financial incentives in solving health professionals’ brain drain, with the view to ascertain its effectiveness. The Systematic Assessment Quantitative Technique (SQAT) developed by Catherine Pickering and Jason Antony Byrne, was used to identify and review 21 relevant peer-reviewed journal articles that investigated six forms of financial incentives in solving health professionals’ brain drain. Evidence from 66.67% of the studies showed that financial incentives are effective in solving health professionals’ brain drain through the use of improved remuneration, funded training, return subsidy and research grant. The remaining part of the studies (33.33%) did not find the use of financial health aid and bonding effective. This study recognized that financial incentives do not fully solve healthcare brain drain and other non-financial measures need to be implemented; future research work should therefore integrate other measures with financial incentives in order to gain additional insight on solving healthcare brain drain. The use of limited but high-quality academic databases means that some articles were not considered for review.

Highlights

Globalisation has made the labour market more dynamic and facilitated the migration of people (Trenz &Triandafyllidou, 2017; Bakker et al, 2017; Gerhards et al, 2017, Svazas & Liberyte, 2019)
We provide an overview of the empirical evidences on the use of financial incentive in solving health professionals’ brain drain, the different methods, their benefits, and challenges in order to gain a comprehensive outlook on the effectiveness of financial incentive in solving health professionals’ brain drain
Using a two-way fixed effects regression analysis to test the relationship between economic freedom and brain drain across 142 developing countries, results showed that an increase in economic freedom is strongly related to lower levels of brain drain; this economic freedom arises from increasing income in the medium to long term (Aarhus & Jakobsen, 2019)

Summary

Introduction

Globalisation has made the labour market more dynamic and facilitated the migration of people (Trenz &Triandafyllidou, 2017; Bakker et al, 2017; Gerhards et al, 2017, Svazas & Liberyte, 2019). On the other hand, educated skilled graduates are attracted to the industralized and mechanized developed countries because of their relative economic prosperity, incentives, scholarships, better living standard, better job opportunities, political stability and state welfare (Razin, 2017; Ozel et al, 2017; Kattel & Sapkota, 2018) This migration negatively impact the community from which they migrate as they transfer their competencies to another country leaving a shortfall in skilled labour behind (Donoso & Mancilla, 2017; Svazas & Liberyte, 2019; Schoenfeld, 2019). It is pragmatic that research be carried out to determine whether the use of financial incentives has been effective in solving health professionals’ brain drain To achieve this important objective, this study reviews empirical journal articles that have sought to investigate the effectiveness of various financial incentive strategies in stemming the migration of healthcare professionals from developing countries to developed countries.

Define topic

Findings

Conclusion