TIRANA, July 21 – Health professionals are migrating from Albania and the Western Balkans in high numbers, according to the latest report by German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
The report notes that currently, Albania has the lowest number of doctors and nurses per capita in Europe. What strikes as most concering is that at the beginning of this decade, seven percent of Albanian doctors worked abroad and a staggering 18 percent worked in 2019.
Germany seems to be the most preferred destination for Albanian health professions as FAZ reports that 765 doctors with Albanian citizenship worked in Germany during 2019, which is 21 percent more than the previous year. In fact, Albania has the highest number of doctors from the region in Germany, followed by Serbia, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The increasing migration of doctors and nurses may be mainly tied to the fact that their salaries in the Balkans are one third of the EU average.
Many professionals have left the country, mainly including engineers, IT specialists as well, with Germany as the preferred destination. During the last two years, nearly 6,500 nurses left the country, and so did about 150 employees of the staff at Mother Teresa University Hospital Center. Moreover, over the past year alone, according to data from the Doctor’s Order, 164 doctors left the country.
