Medical migration

The issue of professional migration, however emotional it may have become, ought not to be regarded in moralizing terms. The history of western medicine is the history of migrating physicians. A doctor who moves from a locality to another to take up a new assignment there cannot be said to have "abandoned his patients". This emotional bond has become the victim of specialization and of depersonalization of medical services and not of medical migration, brain drain or otherwise. The primary reason for medical migration is not financial; the desire to migrate usually begins with the desire to learn. Professionals crave in the first line for professional satisfaction. The migration of medical manpower cannot be stopped with administrative measures and will not be stopped by exhortations and appeals, moralization and condemnations. Brain drain is a global phenomenon and has always been so. A country which loses its professionals, its doctors, should examine the social relationships within the profession and should investigate whether the opportunities for deriving professional satisfaction from everyday work exist or whether these have been thwarted by the hierarchy, conservatism, cronyism and the general lack of comprehension of what good medical care is about.