Abstract
Recent statistics show that over 43,000 Romanian health professionals left the country in the quest for a better life during the last 25 years, nearly half of them being medical doctors. With 130 physicians/100,000 inhabitants, in 2013 Romania ranked the lowest in Europe concerning the number of doctors per capita, and the deficit steadily increased every year. In order to bring an informed perspective on this problematic phenomenon, the paper aims to investigate upon the main reason behind the health professionals’ decision to leave the country. To this purpose, we applied a survey on a sample of health professionals, and explore a number of potential explanatory factors acting like potential drivers: payment, working conditions, informal practices, etc. These were partially adapted from a study on emigration preferences for Romanian medical students (Suciu et al. 2017). The results were then correlated with the overall satisfaction the participants feel for their workplace, pointing to different explanatory layers for what may drive a medical doctor or a nurse to leave the country versus what impacts their professional satisfaction. Age, gender, the length of current employment, and other relevant variables served as control variables.
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This research was supported by a Marie Curie Research and Innovation Staff Exchange scheme within the H2020 Programme (grant acronym: SHADOW, no: 778118).
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Druică, E., Ianole-Călin, R. (2022). Perceived Pull and Push Factors of Healthcare Professionals Intention for Mobility: The Case of Romania. In: Polese, A. (eds) Informality, Labour Mobility and Precariousness. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82499-0_12
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