About The Project:

The increasing trend in the migration of healthcare workers within the scope of international migration of highly professionally qualified workers has become one of the main topics of discussion in both migration research and social policy. 2019 OECD study shows that the number of immigrant doctors and nurses is rapidly increasing within OECD countries.[1] Projections regarding the future of healthcare workers indicate that there is evidence that international migration of healthcare workers will continue to increase.It is known that migration in this area mainly occurs from underdeveloped and developing countries to developed countries. According to the findings, the USA ranks first, the United Kingdom ranks second and Germany ranks third as the target country for physician immigration (OECD, 2019). It is stated that 11 percent of physicians and nurses working in Germany were born abroad and this rate tends to increase during and after Covid-19 period (OECD, 2019).

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Turkey’s position within global migration movements has been undergoing a rapid transformation since the 1990s. While Turkey was a country that emigrated to European countries, especially Germany with unskilled and semi-skilled labour migration known as the guest worker program in the 1960s, it became one of the central countries of irregular migration and transit migration movements in the 1990s. In the 2000s Turkey became the target country of immigrants with different status. In this process, an increase in the migration of qualified workforce from Turkey to other countries is observed. The need for employees with higher professional qualifications in the labour markets in certain sectors such as information technology, engineering, health and finance in Germany, together with the effect of the immigration policies followed by this country, causes an increase in the high-skilled migration mobility from Turkey to Germany. Germany is an important destination country fort he migration of healthcare professionals with Professional expertise from Turkey. Indeed, according to the data of the Turkish Medical Association, while the number of physicians who requested a certificate to immigrate from Turkey in 2012 was 59, this number increased to 1361 in the first 11 months of 2021 (TTB, 2022).

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The aim of this project is to examine the migration of physicians, one of the highly professionally qualified healthcare workers from Turkey to Germany, within the framework of the push-pull theory and to determine which push and pull factors are more effective in their migration decisions. Another aim of the research is to reveal the determinants of reverse migration tendencies (probability of developing intention to return) of Turkish physicians-using the logit model- and to make policy recommendations to ensure reverse brain drain. A mixed method will be followed in the project to achieve its core objectives.Within the scope of the quantitative research, 384 surveys will be conducted with Turkish physicians in Germany. Within the scope of the qualitative research, 30 in-depth interviews will be conducted with physicians in Germany and 36 in-depth interviews with physicians in Turkey. In this context, this research aims to make a unique contribution to qualified migration research.

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The research to be carried out within the scope of the project also aims to contribute to the literature on immigrant networks, institutional structures and practices that affect migration (such as attending language courses, applyling to employment agencies, obtaining official documents and certificates) and social/cultural capital. The survey and in-depth interviews will focus on how the physician immigrants within the scope of the research manage their professional and personal lives before and after immigration in both countries. Another aim is to determine how physicians who immigrated to Germany experienced the process of gaining qualifications and professional adaptation in the health sector in this country, in the context of the health sector, labour market conditions and working relationships.

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The potential results of this research are expected to show that physician migration can play an important role in development and increasing the capacity of health systems not only in destination countries but also in source countries. The findings to be obtained will have results that will closely affect the policies of institutions regulating the international labour market, professional organizations of all healthcare professionals, especially physicians, researchers and UN international organizations such as WHO and ILO. The research will also contribute to the development and implementation of healthy models for bilateral and multilateral agreements on the recruitment of international health professionals and to the identification of originalities regarding the migration of physicians in order to protect both the physicians and health systems. These results and mutual agreements between countries could encourage regional migration for critical skills and facilitate return migration or circular migration.

 

[1] The number of foreign trained physicians working in OECD countries increased by 50 percent between 2006 and 2016, reaching almost 500.000 in 2016, while the number of foreign-trained nurses increased by 20 percent in the five-year period between 2011 and 2016, reaching almost 550.000 (OECD, 2019).