CHANGES IN EMMIGRATION OF HEALTH WORKERS IN NUTS III. REGIONS OF THE SLOVAK REPUBLIC

Labor emigration is one of the issues that the professional public has recently been paying more attention to. The global pandemic COVID-19 target our attention to research the emigration of health workers from the Slovak Republic for jobs abroad. The share of the postproductive population is constantly increasing, Life expectancy at birth is increasing, or the number of healthy life years improve more only slowly, which had the big impact on increased demand for health services before the pandemic. This problem is compounded by long-term labor shortages in health services and regional disparities. Based on time series capturing the development of doctors, nurses and health professionals calculated per 10-year population an analysis of the current situation is performed. The main aim of this paper is to find out changes in emmigration health-care workers to the territory of the Slovak Republic in the last ten years in individual NUTS III. regions. We will also find out by means of the Beta-convergence method whether individual NUTS III. regions of the Slovak Republic in the number of emmigrants health-care workers in the last ten years show a tendency towards convergence or divergence of the number of doctors, nurses and emigrants of health care workers from the Slovak Republic for work abroad.