EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Home is home—Botswana’s return migrant health workers

Keneilwe Motlhatlhedi and Oathokwa Nkomazana

PLOS ONE, 2018, vol. 13, issue 11, 1-16

Abstract: The shortage of skilled healthcare workers in Sub-Saharan Africa is aggravated by their emigration to high resource countries. There is evidence that a small number of healthcare workers return to their home countries. It is important to understand the factors that influence decisions to return in order to develop appropriate strategies to attract more back. This study sought to investigate the perspectives of healthcare workers who returned to Botswana after working in the diaspora. We conducted semi-structured interviews of 8 healthcare workers. Using the thematic analysis method we developed a thematic index to code the data. The main reasons for returning were family ties and missing home whilst the key reasons for emigration were concerns about the quality of health care, lack of professional progression opportunities and feeling under-valued. Difficulties reintegrating into the Botswana health care system are a potential push factors for those who return. Policies that aim to attract back healthcare workers should address professional progression, reintegration and improvement of the healthcare system.

Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0206969 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 06969&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0206969

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0206969

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0206969