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Governing health professional mobility in the European Union

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. Many of the so-called pull and push factors influencing mobility of individuals are in the remit of countries and organizations. In Europe, these pull and push factors are co-determined by EU policies on free mobility, the qualifications directive and many soft-law initiatives.

This presentation is reviewing the current mobility trends in Europe and provides clues on how to strengthen governance for human resources for health at European and country level. A particular reference is made to mobility monitoring, workforce intelligence, workforce policies/ strategies, skills-initiatives and coordination mechanisms across sectors and levels.

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This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

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Wismar, M. Governing health professional mobility in the European Union. BMC Health Serv Res 14 (Suppl 2), O33 (2014). https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.1186/1472-6963-14-S2-O33

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  • DOI: https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.1186/1472-6963-14-S2-O33

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