Health professional mobility in a changing Europe. New dynamics, mobile individuals and diverse responses

Health professional mobility in Europe has become a fast-moving target for policy-makers. It is evolving rapidly in direction and magnitude as a consequence of fundamental change caused by European Union (EU) enlargement and the financial and economic crisis.

Health professional mobility changes the numbers of health professionals in countries and the skill-mix of the workforce, with consequences for health-system performance. Countries must factor in mobility if they are forecasting and planning their workforce requirements. To this end they need clarity on mobility trends and the mobile workforce, and effective interventions for retaining domestic and integrating foreign-trained health workers. Health professional mobility remains an unfinished agenda in Europe, at a time when the repercussions of the financial crisis continue to have an impact on the European health workforce and its patterns of mobility.

This book sheds new light on health professional mobility in this changing Europe. It is the second volume of the PROMeTHEUS project, following the previously published country case study volume. The 14 thematic chapters in this book are grouped in three parts:

+ the changing dynamics of health professional mobility
+ the mobile individual
+ policy responses in a changing Europe.

The book goes well beyond situation analysis as it presents practical tools such as a yardstick for registry methodology, a typology of mobile individuals, qualitative tools for studying the motivation of the workforce and a set of concrete policy responses at EU, national and organizational level including bilateral agreements, codes and workplace responses.