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Let’s ask Jo! She’ll know!
Q: What, exactly, is "brain drain" and does Iowa suffer from it?
A: Iowa is in critical condition, which threatens health care access and patient safety for every Iowan. In general, "brain drain" refers to a group of trained persons leaving a geographic location. Specifically, it's Iowa losing its highly-skilled health care professionals to other states. Our two medical schools, the University of Iowa and DMU, do not track this data, but the Association of American Medical Schools does. They tell us that less than one quarter of our medical school grads remain in Iowa to practice. Chew on that. While there is pending federal legislation to allow Iowa to hire more foreign-trained physicians, we let over three-quarters of Iowa-educated doctors get away. And only about a third of our graduates stick around after their residencies (we rank 44th for that). As for our nurses, no data, so I can't say.
What is causing this?
The health care labor shortages we're now experiencing are a perfect storm of Iowa's shrinking workforce of 18 to 64 year olds, non-competitive salaries and health care workers being pulled through a knothole on a daily basis. Ergo, the brain drain is both a cause and an effect of these circumstances. Iowa ranks 51st (dead last) for nurses' salaries and recently dropped for doctors' pay, so incentives to serve in rural Iowa are meaningless when out-of-state compensation is kicking our rear end. This is not brain surgery, it's the part of Economics 101 each of us does remember: supply, demand, price.
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