Romania tries to prevent emigration of doctors

According to an opinion poll conducted by a European medical foundation, 45 per cent of Romanian doctors and medical assistants want to emigrate. According to the doctors’ professional body in France, the number of Romanian doctors practising in France has risen by 320 per cent in the last ten months. Since January 2008, more than 7,000 health professionals have sought from the Romanian authorities a certificate which they can use to have their qualifications recognised abroad. The Romanian authorities, though, are playing down the risk of losing their doctors on the same scale as Poland has lost hers. But there is already a shortage of anaesthetists, cardiologists, urologists and neurosurgeons in Romanian hospitals. The danger is of course that medical students will go abroad before completing their studies, completing them instead in a foreign country and therefore disappearing from the official statistics (because they will have not been qualified at the time they emigrate). The Romanian government is, though, trying to persuade people to stay by promising to build some thirty new hospitals and to increase the monthly salary from 220 euros to 400. At any rate, it is estimated that some 3 million Romanians have already left their country to work abroad, which means that there is already massive emigration, and not only from among the most highly educated section of society. [Mirel Bran, Le Monde, 9 August 2008]

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