Thursday, February 18, 2010

How to reduce the brain drain in the medical sector

In developed countries, human resources in health care are very scarce, and medical institutions have been aggressively hiring in developed countries. While this is good for developed economies, this is much worse for developing ones, as human capital is harder to come by. Having your best people leave makes it difficult to justify investment in upper level education. What could then be made to help reduce this medical brain drain?

One proposal is to improve medical infrastructure and thus make working in the medical sector in developing economics more appealing. This can be done through foreign health assistance, that is development aid targeted towards medical facilities. Yasser Moullan says this works remarkably well, especially in less corrupt countries. This implies that the main reason that physicians are moving North is not the pay, but rather the working conditions.

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