Resource detail

Migration of healthcare professionals across and within national boundaries may benefit individual career progress but can result in certain regions and countries having insufficient resources to meet healthcare needs(1,2). Developing strategies to ensure a balanced distribution of staff requires information about patterns of migration but this is often inaccurate and lacks comparability across borders(1). Here we consider how regionally comparable data can inform nursing workforce planning in the UK; we draw on a Nursing Research Unit study of nurses’ movements between regions (3,4), and other research on the internal migration patterns of health professionals (5-9) and of the general population.