the brain drain potential of students in the african health and nonhealth sectors人才流失的潜在学生非洲卫生和nonhealth部门.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation International Journal of Population Research Volume 2012, Article ID 274305, 10 pages doi:10.1155/2012/274305 Research Article The Brain Drain Potential of Students in the African Health and Nonhealth Sectors Jonathan Crush1, 2 and Wade Pendleton2 1 Balsillie School of International Aff airs, Waterloo, ON, Canada N2L 6C2 2 University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7701, South Africa Correspondence should be addressed to Jonathan Crush, crushj@queensu.ca Received 8 November 2011; Revised 31 January 2012; Accepted 28 February 2012 Academic Editor: Pranitha Maharaj Copyright © 2012 J. Crush and W. Pendleton. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The departure of health professionals to Europe and North America is placing an intolerable burden on public health systems in many African countries. Various retention, recall, and replacement policies to ameliorate the impact of this brain drain have been suggested, none of which have been particularly successful to date. The key question for the future is whether the brain drain of health sector skills is likely to continue and whether the investment of African countries in training health professionals will continue to be lost through emigration. This paper examines the emigration intentions of trainee health professionals in six Southern African countries. The data was collected by the Southern African Migration Program (SAMP) in a survey of final-year students across the region which included 651 students training for the health professions. The data also allows for the comparison of health sector with other students.