Many Croatian physicians and nurses are thinking about going abroad.
Twelve recruitment agencies participated on Sunday at the Ninth Fair of Careers in Healthcare in Zagreb. The greatest demand was for family physicians, skilled nurses with five years of education, nursing graduates, and physical therapists, said Silva Karpowicz Rukavina from Careers in White International company, which is regularly coming to medical recruitment fairs to find medical staff for work in western Europe, reports Poslovni.hr on October 3, 2016.
While specialists are offered jobs with attractive gross salaries of over 3,000 euros, depending on experience and specialization, family doctors are currently an absolute hit in the labour market. They are particularly in demand in France, Britain, Germany, Sweden and Denmark. Nurses are also in demand in all the countries of Europe, to work in hospitals, palliative care facilities, private rehabilitation clinics and homes for the elderly. “A monthly net salary of a qualified nurse with work experience in Germany is about 2,200 euros”, said Karpowicz Rukavina. Physical therapists are in demand in Britain, Ireland, Germany and Austria, mostly to work in nursing homes and rehabilitation centres, and their starting net salary is slightly less, around 1,800 euros, depending on the tax bracket and experience.
Karpowitz Rukavina invited interested visitors at the fair to submit an application and send their resume so that employers could contact them later. The fair has been held twice a year in Zagreb since 2012, and organizers say that each year there are around 400 to 500 job seekers.
The fair every year again raises the issue of “the exodus of Croatian physicians” to Western Europe, but Health Minister Dario Nakić recently said that the data were not alarming and, looking at the number of doctors, Croatia was not far from the EU average. “We can often hear a variety of information about the number of physicians, but we do not have such a big problem as it is sometimes being presented”, said Nakić. He added that in Croatia there were 343 doctors per 100,000 inhabitants, while the average in the European Union is 350.
Nakić presented his vision of measures necessary to retain medical personnel in Croatia. He explained that the most important issue was additional training, which should be made easier and more available so that Croatian physicians would not leave the country.
