Migration of International Medical Graduates: Implications for the Brain-Drain

摘要

Studies indicate that about 23 percent to 28 percent of the physicians working and residing in the United States,Canada, Australia, the UK and New Zealand were born and trained in the low-income countries, areas suffering fromcritical shortages of physicians and other health workers. In the US alone, the preponderance of the foreign physicianshails from South Africa, Philippines, India, Pakistan, and Nigeria. From Africa alone where the burden of disease,poverty, deprivation and death are greatest, around 23,000 qualified physicians emigrate annually. From the perspectivesof the low-income countries, significant amounts of resources are, by necessity, committed into turning their nationals intovital intellectual capital for their own desperately needed health needs and crumbling healthcare systems. Thus, themigration of these physicians to other nations to help strengthen their already stable health care systems is not onlyethically deplorable but poses moral hazards for both the physicians and the high-income countries. That is, high-incomecountries such as the United States, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand are draining the scarce recourses of thelow-income countries through the loss of intellectual capital, a phenomenon that socio-economic and developmentalexperts have dubbed “the brain drain”.