“It is irrational and immoral to recruit health workers from countries where one in five children die before their fifth birthday when we could be recruiting and training workers domestically,” says Kate Tulenko in today’s New York Times.

In her Op-Ed, Tulenko writes about the moral and economic consequences of America’s reliance on foreign-born and foreign-trained health workers. Tulenko is senior director of health systems innovation at IntraHealth International.

The implications for the health care system in source countries such as India—the biggest source of foreign health workers in the US—are dire, Tulenko says.

India is one of 57 countries experiencing a crisis-level shortage of health workers, according to the World Health Organization. A staggering 1.7 million children under the age of five died in India in 2011.

Mortality and health outcomes such as this have been related to access to health workers, Tulenko says. Yet a special US visa program makes it easy to hire health workers from India, drawing them away from their home country.

There are also consequences here in the US. The best-known way to get health workers to practice in underserved areas is to recruit and train people from underserved communities, Tulenko says.

“But because we’ve essentially given up on recruiting from underserved places in the United States, we’ve made their chronic lack of health workers much worse,” she says. “Some 54 million people live in the 5,700 parts of the country defined as ‘health professional shortage areas,’ the communities with the worst health statistics and the worst unemployment.”

Read more about the issue and Tulenko’s recommendations.

Related Content:

• Read more about this issue in this recent interview with Tulenko. 

• Read an excerpt from Insourced by Dr. Kate Tulenko (Dartmouth College Press, 2012).