Eastern Europe's dwindling workforce

Liana Subtirelu notes with concern that more and more doctors are emigrating to France and Great Britain, where they earn ten to twenty times as much as they would in Romania (around 130 euros per month). "The authorities are beginning to realise that in addition to the 'strawberry pickers' another professional class is being affected by the exodus: the medical profession. Many doctors left the country even before the EU accession, but the number of emigrants was never high enough to cause concern. Now companies that specialise in recruiting professionals have been set up here in Romania. The first of these companies came from Great Britain in search of dentists. Companies from France followed... The Ministry of Health seems helpless in the face of these developments. In addition to the poor state of the system, there's the problem of a general lack of respect for doctors in their own country. No sooner had he took office than the minister for health, Eugen Nicolaescu, started talking about how corrupt doctors were."

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