Austria is a country of both emigration and immigration of health professionals. From one side, it has a significant stock of immigrants working in health care and it experiences increasing inflow of third country nationals to this sector, which could have been triggered with the opening of the Austrian labour market to new European Union (EU) Member States in 2011. It is estimated that about 6–16.5% of nursing personnel working in Austrian hospitals and about 14.5% of physicians are foreign born. Apart from that, there are also significant numbers of illegal foreign workers working in homecare. Recent legalisation of this sector showed that there is above 20,000 of them, coming mainly from Slovakia. At the same time, there are still significant shortages in healthcare personnel in Austria and the demand for foreign specialists seems to be high. The emigration from Austria is mainly an issue of brain circulation between German speaking countries. Young physicians, due to the long waiting times for specialisation places in Austria, are the most prone to emigrate. There are 8% Austrian physicians working abroad.
CONTENT:
- Background
- Health care system
- Education and training
- Policies
- Migration of health professionals