Overseas nurse recruitment: Ireland as an illustration of the dynamic nature of nurse migration

The national and international implications of a decade of doctor migration in the Irish context

“…Registration with the MCI does not mean that migration to Ireland has actually taken place, and may just indicate intent to migrate [43], or migration to Ireland with the hope of then working as a doctor in Ireland. Additionally, some doctors maintain their MCI registration once they have either emigrated from Ireland, or have stopped practicing medicine [9].…”

Nurse migration and health workforce planning: Ireland as illustrative of international challenges

“…Such was the success of international nurse recruitment campaigns in filling vacant posts within the Irish health system [7] that it enabled underlying nurse workforce planning problems to be obscured [8,9], specifically issues relating to retention. The past decade saw almost as many nurses recruited internationally as trained locally -14,546 non-EU and non-Irish EU-trained nurses joined the Irish nursing workforce between 2000 and 2010, alongside 17,264 Irish-trained nurses [10].…”

“…Within the hospitals, international nurse recruitment was perceived as a stop-gap measurea short-term solution to the shortage of nurses [14] with the understanding being that Irish-trained nurses would be prioritised for recruitment as soon as more graduates came on stream [14]. As a result, the early international recruits were initially issued with two year employment contracts [14], largely to enable the health system to adapt to a 'gap year' in which there were no graduating nurses in Ireland (as a result of the transition from a three year to a four year degree programme) [15] [7]. Although the gap year theory helps to explain the 'peak' recruitment of 2005/6 it fails to account for the significant recruitment levels in 2001, 2002 and 2007 (see Figure 2).…”

Migrants and healthcare: Investigating patient mobility among migrants in Ireland

“…In Ireland, the relationship between migrants and healthcare has most often been discussed in terms of pressures on service provision (see HSE 2008HSE , 2009Pillinger 2008), access to healthcare for vulnerable groups such as asylum seekers and undocumented migrants (see, for example, Cáirde 2006;Cuadra 2010;Radford 2010;Ryan et al 2007), impacts on disease prevalence (Pringle 2009), and the role of migrant workers in the healthcare system (Humphries et al 2008(Humphries et al , 2009. Patient mobility has mostly been discussed in terms of women traveling to Ireland to give birth 1 (White and Gilmartin 2008), or in terms of Irish residents traveling abroad to avail of cheaper health care (Gilmartin and White 2011).…”