Article Text
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Hidalgo offers a novel and interesting defence of the active recruitment of health workers by organisations based in the developed world.1 His conclusions are highly controversial and run directly counter to those drawn by a large number of bioethicists, empirical researchers and national and international organisations interested in the issue of health worker migration.
The debate about the effects of the migration of healthcare professionals began in earnest in the 1970s. During this decade a number of researchers argued that migration flows from the developing to the developed world were detrimental to poorer countries and suggested that policies ought to be put in place to both retard the flow of migration and compensate countries for the negative effects of any ongoing migration.2 However, some researchers have recently argued that the migration of healthcare workers has many positive effects.3 This is because migration encourages human capital investment, leads to large scale flows of remittances back to source countries, encourages the transfer of knowledge, innovations and best practice, and improves trade relations. Clemens even argues that the net effects of migration are positive—which implies that the so called …
Footnotes
-
Competing interests None.
-
Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
Linked Articles
- Feature article
- Commentary
- Commentary
- Commentary
- Commentary
- Commentary
- Concise argument
Read the full text or download the PDF:
Other content recommended for you
- Adding insult to injury: the healthcare brain drain
- Challenges for WHO code on international recruitment
- The active recruitment of health workers: a defence
- Defending the active recruitment of health workers: a response to commentators
- Brain drain in sub-Saharan Africa: contributing factors, potential remedies and the role of academic medical centres
- Rural to urban migration is associated with increased prevalence of childhood wheeze in a Latin-American city
- International migration of health labour: monitoring the two-way flow of physicians in South Africa
- What should be done to address losses associated with ‘medical brain drain’?
- Compensation and hazard pay for key workers during an epidemic: an argument from analogy
- Is active recruitment of health workers really not guilty of enabling harm or facilitating wrongdoing?