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Recruitment of consultant psychiatrists from low- and middle-income countries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

David Ndetei ,
Salman Karim  and
Malik Mubbashar
David Ndetei
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry, University of Nairobi, Kenya, email dmndetei@uonbi.ac.ke
Salman Karim
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry, University of Manchester, UK
Malik Mubbashar
Affiliation:
University of Health Sciences, Lahore, Pakistan
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The UK's 2-year International Fellowship Programme for consultant doctors has inadvertently highlighted the long-standing issues of the costs and benefits of such recruitment for the countries of origin, and of whether it is ethical for rich countries to recruit health personnel not only from other rich countries but also from low- and middle-income countries. The ‘brain drain’ from poor to rich countries has been recognised for decades; it occurs in the health sector as well as other sectors, such as education, science and engineering. It has had serious ramifications for the health service infrastructure in low-income countries, where poverty, morbidity, disability and mortality are increasing rather than decreasing, and it is a matter of serious concern for both the World Health Organization and the International Monetary Fund (Carrington & Detragiache, 1998; Lee, 2003).

Type
Special Paper
Information
International Psychiatry , Volume 1 , Issue 6 , October 2004 , pp. 15 - 18
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal College of Psychiatrists 2004

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