ABSTRACT
One important explanation for the flow of health care workers across national borders is the growing demand and expectation in affluent countries, including Western welfare states, for affordable, quality long-term care services (OECD 2005: 10). This is one part of a global trend. Foreign-trained health care workers are increasingly likely to move from low-income countries with an inadequate number of care workers and high disease burdens to more prosperous and healthy parts of the world, especially North America, Western Europe, and the high-income countries in the Gulf and the Western Pacific (Polsky et al. 2007). This migration is skewing the distribution of the global health workforce and deepening health inequities, creating a global “crisis in health” (WHO 2006).
