Abstract
The chapter explains how health professional mobility impacts on the resources and capacity available within a health system, and how this affects service delivery and access. The contrasting experiences of destination countries, which receive foreign inflows of health professionals, and of source countries, which loose workforce due to outflows, are illustrated with country examples. The evidence opens the debate on how EU countries compete for health workforce, what this means for resource-strained, crisis-hit Member States, and whether there is any room for intra-European solidarity. The nexus between patient mobility and health professional mobility is moreover highlighted. This take on free mobility in the EU has received little attention, and while evidence is scarce, it calls for careful analysis when considering the possible effects of free movement on access to care in national health systems. The chapter reformulates the question on ‘who wins’ and ‘who looses’ from freedom of movement in the EU to turn our attention away from those who go abroad for care and instead focus on those who stay at home.
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Notes
- 1.
A distinction is made here between planned care for which the patients travels deliberately to another country, and emergency care which the patient needs while traveling abroad. In this chapter, ‘patient mobility’ refers only to traveling abroad for planned care.
- 2.
- 3.
Dutch Health Insurance Board. www.cvz.nl/zorgcijfers/zvw-lasten/zvw-lasten.html.
- 4.
Austria, Belgium, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, and the UK.
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Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the USA.
- 6.
Interviews with representative from nursing staff association (28 March 2012) and HR advisor (3 April 2012), Maastricht University Hospital.
- 7.
Regulation (EC) No 883/2004 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 29 April 2004 on the coordination of social security systems, OJ 23.04. 2004, L166/1 (formerly Regulation EEC No 1408/71).
- 8.
Directive 2011/24/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 9 March 2011 on the application of patients’ rights in cross-border health care. Official Journal of the European Union 2011; 54; 45–65. http://eurlex.europa.eu/JOHtml.do?uri=OJ:L:2011:088:SOM:EN:HTML
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Glinos, I.A. (2014). The Possible Effects of Health Professional Mobility on Access to Care for Patients. In: Levaggi, R., Montefiori, M. (eds) Health Care Provision and Patient Mobility. Developments in Health Economics and Public Policy, vol 12. Springer, Milano. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-88-470-5480-6_4
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