Nearly 9,000 doctors who graduated in Romania, left the country to work in France and Germany, while almost another 2,000 went to Hungary.
The salaries within the Romanian healthcare system in the previous five years have increased by about 150%, but even despite the large-scale increase, the number of doctors leaving the country slowed down only slightly. According to medijobs.ro, the salary of a resident working in a hospital is now between RON 5,700 – 7,900 (EUR 1,180 – 1,630), while a medical specialist’s pay is RON 12,500 (EUR 2,580).
Last year in Romania, about 1,500 doctors requested the necessary documents from authorities to work abroad. One year earlier, this number was 1,600. On the other hand, only 150 medical experts working abroad decided to return to Romania.
According to the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the highest number of doctors working abroad who graduated in Romania are working in France: Their number in 2018 was 4,800. Nearly 20% of foreign-born doctors practicing in France graduated in Romania. Germany has 4,000 doctors from Romania, which is 8.8% of its foreign-born medical experts.
The third largest doctor community from Romania can be found in Hungary. Their number is 1,900. No doubt, the vast majority of them are Transylvanian-Hungarian doctors who graduated in Marosvásárhely (Târgu Mureș). They represent 70% of 2,674 doctors working in Hungary even though they graduated outside the country.
Also, many doctors from Romania are working in Belgium (1,400) and in the UK (1,300). The highest absolute number of foreign-born doctors in Europe is in the UK (58, 000) and in Germany (45,000).
Out of the 60,000 doctors working in Romania, 850 graduated abroad. Most of them arrived from Moldova, but many also came from different Arabic countries. Most foreign-born doctors in Romania are working in the country’s big healthcare centers in Bucharest, Temesvár (Timișoara), Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca) and Iași.
There is no valid data available on how many doctors have left Romania in the previous thirty years, since the political changes, but according to estimates, this number is somewhere between 10,000 and 40,000. The real number most probably is closer to the latter if we take into consideration that more than 3,000 have left the country just in the past two years. (maszol.ro)
Title image: Illustration, doctors in a Hungarian hospital in May 2020. (Photo: MTI)
