Medical migration: options and responsibilities for the “brain drain”

Various strategies have been proposed in the literature to reduce medical migration or ‘brain drain’ and mitigate its effects on health status. This paper outlines an ethical framework and uses it to examine these strategies, emphasizing the goal of a basic level of health care for all people, the protection of rights and the fostering of responsibilities, and the prioritization of the least-advantaged. A social connection model of responsibility is used to consider the different duties of migrants, source countries, destination countries, and global institutions. Solutions which change the inequities driving medical migration are preferable to those which simply reduce the harm resulting from the phenomenon.