A report by German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has painted a grim view of the migration of health professionals from Albania and other Balkan countries in recent years.
Koha newspaper brings the Tuesday report’s highlights regarding Albania:
— Albania has the lowest number of doctors and nurses per capita in Europe;
— At the beginning of this decade, 7 percent of Albanian doctors worked abroad; 18 percent worked in 2019;
— In 2019, 765 doctors with Albanian citizenship worked in Germany. This is 21 percent more than the previous year. Albania has the highest number of doctors from the region in Germany, followed by Serbia, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina;
— Countries such as Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Slovakia are tackling the crisis by raising the number of students per 100 thousand inhabitants in faculties of medicine compared to the average of EU countries. FAZ does not mention what Albania and Kosovo are doing in this regard;
— The salaries of health professionals in the Balkans are one third of the EU average.
