A Preliminary Working Draft on Migration of Nurses: The Case of Kerala, India
Interim Report
A Preliminary Working Draft on Migration of Nurses: The Case of Kerala, India (446KB) / Hisaya Oda, Irudaya S. Rajan and Yuko Tsujita
Data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shows that an average of 5.9% of the total nursing workforce in OECD countries is foreign-trained. Indian and Filipino nurses are the most heavily recruited for English-speaking OECD countries, but the ratio, annual inflow, and source countries differ by country.
In this paper, we argue that, recently, migration patterns and processes, the socioeconomic backgrounds of nurses, and the objectives of migration have undergone a dramatic transformation from historical trends of overseas employment and remittances.
The number of emigrants from Kerala has steadily increased since 1998, reaching 2.4 million people in 2014, but the rate of this increase has slowed in recent years. Although about 30% of all households in Kerala have a migrant worker, the prevalence differs according to religion and district. Furthermore, an increase has been seen in international migrant workers' remittances, which currently exceed the revenue receipts of the state government.