How to support migrant physicians in navigating through an unfamiliar health care system

In the last decade, Germany has seen the steepest increase of foreign-trained ¹ physicians among member countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which are typically considered receiving countries of the global medical brain drain (OECD 2015). Numbers of migrant physicians have long been low in Germany – 5% in 2006 (Ognyanova & Busse 2011). One reason might be that the country had not considered itself an ‘immigration country’ and restricted labour market access to high-skilled migrants, including physicians (Fellmer 2008). This changed primarily because the physician associations in the 2000s warned about a physician shortage (Hoesch 2009), which was backed by various studies (Blum & Löffert 2010; Kopetsch 2010). In 2016, approximately 11% of all practicing physicians were foreign nationals, coming mainly from European countries like Austria, Greece or Romania but also increasingly from politically unstable countries outside Europe, like Syria (Bundesärztekammer 2017).