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Abstract
BackgroundHealth professionals, particularly doctors, nurses and midwives, are in high demand worldwide. Therefore, it is important to assess the future plans and likelihood of return of emigrating health professionals. Nevertheless, health professionals are, by definition, a difficult population to track/survey. This exploratory study reports on the migration intentions of a sample of doctors, nurses and midwives who had emigrated from Ireland, a high-income country which has experienced particularly high outward and inward migration of health professionals since the year 2000.MethodsHealth professionals who had emigrated from Ireland were identified via snowball sampling through Facebook and invited to complete a short online survey composed of closed and open response questions.ResultsA total of 388 health professionals (307 doctors, 73 nurses and 8 midwives) who had previously worked in Ireland completed the survey. While over half had originally intended to spend less than 5 years in their destination country at the time of emigration, these intentions changed over time, with the desire to remain abroad on a permanent basis increasing from 10 to 34 % of doctor respondents. Only a quarter of doctors and a half of nurses and midwives intended to return to practice in Ireland in the future.ConclusionsThe longer health professionals remain abroad, the less likely they are to return to their home countries. Countries should focus on the implementation of retention strategies if the ‘carousel’ of brain drain is to be interrupted. This would allow source countries to benefit from their investments in training health professionals, rather than relying on international recruitment to meet health system staffing needs. Improved data collection systems are also needed to track the migratory patterns and changing intentions of health professionals. Meanwhile, social networking platforms offer alternative methods of filling this information gap.
Highlights
Health professionals, doctors, nurses and midwives, are in high demand worldwide
Participants As this paper aimed to explore the intentions of emigrant health professionals, eligible participants were defined as health professionals who had worked in Ireland but who were working as a health professional in another country
Respondent characteristics A total of 556 people accessed the survey, of whom 388 were eligible to participate. Those who were ineligible to participate included health professionals who were working in Ireland and individuals who were not health professionals
Summary
Doctors, nurses and midwives, are in high demand worldwide. Health professionals are, by definition, a difficult population to track/survey This exploratory study reports on the migration intentions of a sample of doctors, nurses and midwives who had emigrated from Ireland, a high-income country which has experienced high outward and inward migration of health professionals since the year 2000. Improving data collection on health worker migration has been declared a priority by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [10]. Ireland is beginning to improve upon and coordinate the data it collects concerning the migration of health professionals through the design of a minimum dataset as part of its commitment under the WHO Global Code [5]. The reality continues to be that countries struggle with out-of-date and incomplete datasets on the migration, whereabouts and countries of origin of health professionals [7]
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