Foreign physicians and other health care providers

Health care delivery to underserved, often underprivileged, populations is not only a problem for the countries of the developing world; numerous segments of the world's most advanced countries also suffer from a quantitative and qualitative lack of health care for geographic, cultural, economic, racial, and other reasons. In the field of international health, one can conclude that the richer countries should make resources available to the less advantaged countries, but cannot expect a mass transfer of human resources, including physicians and other health workers; such a transfer in any case would be inappropriate for political, economic, social, and cultural reasons. What can be done is to focus on those resources that will enable the less developed countries to educate and train their own cadre of appropriate health workers.