Global Healthcare Worker Migration

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The global migration of healthcare workers is one of the most widely studied issues in healthcare worldwide. Fueled by a global shortage of healthcare workers, this movement is considered a crisis in health sector human resources. Over the past half century, the need for skilled healthcare workers has increased in wealthy countries, which have not been able to keep up training and retaining a sufficient labor force to fill their demands and, thus, have increasingly relied on foreign-trained healthcare workers. Migrants are motivated by push factors in their home countries and pull factors in receiving countries. While some countries are capitalizing on the global market demand to facilitate export of their workers, some poor countries who lose their skilled workers to more developed countries are concerned about “brain drain.” Private, for-profit recruitment firms are increasingly entering this market and shaping migration patterns. The general consensus of research in this field is that more work needs to be done globally to build the capacity for training healthcare workers, increase recruitment and retention of healthcare workers in their local regions, and manage the global movement of healthcare workers of their own accord.