Nursing & Healthcare

Biography

Biography: Yasser Moullan

Abstract

Today, several OECD countries face shortages of physicians in remote areas. Policymakers try to tackle this issue by creating a suffi cient number of physicians through training system into medical schools and by recruiting internationally. Th is paper investigates which strategies OECD governments adopt and when these policies are really eff ective to address the medical shortages. We argue that due to the duration of training in medicine, the eff ectiveness of the medical school policy should be longer compared to the recruitment of foreign physicians. We built a dataset that comprises information about medical shortage, the number of medical graduates and the number of foreign trained physicians by using the A. Bhargava et al. (2011) dataset for 17 OECD countries between 1991 and 2004. Our empirical results confi rm our theoretical assumption. We found that OECD governments aft er a period of medical shortages create a higher number of medical graduates and in the same time hire much more from abroad. In terms of policy time delay, medical education policy takes at least fi ve years whereas the recruitment from abroad only takes one year to address the shortage issue. Finally, we found that foreign physicians over-respond to the shortage of physicians in OECD countries.