Migration of health workers.

The discussion and debate stimulated by these papers focused across a range of issues but there were four main areas of questioning: "measuring" and monitoring migration (issues related to comparability, completeness and accuracy of data sets on human resources); the impact of migration of health workers on health systems; the motivations of individual health workers to migrate (the "push" and "pull" factors) and the effect of policies designed either to reduce migration (e.g "self ufficiency") or to stimulate it (e.g active international recruitment). It was recognised that there was a critical need to examine migratory flows within the broader context of all health care labour market dynamics within a country, that increasing migration of health workers was an inevitable consequence of globalisation, and that there was a critical need to improve monitoring so as to better inform policy formulation and policy testing in this area.