Between 2009 and 2015, half of Romania's doctors moved to Western European countries.

Omissions

• No primary source (Romanian College of Physicians / Colegiul Medicilor din România, Eurostat, OECD, or national statistics) directly and precisely confirms the 'half' figure for the 2009-2015 window; the available support is a news article (Romania Insider) and an academic working paper that cites that same article.
• The 'half of doctors' figure is a contested estimate: other accounts of Romanian physician emigration over the same period put the absolute number of leavers well below half of the active physician workforce, so the precise magnitude is disputed.
• The claim frames the destination exclusively as 'Western European countries'; the emigration flows were broader (also to other EU/OECD countries and beyond), so 'Western European' is a simplification.
• The most relevant sources predate the session date by several years (2017 and 2021), so the MEP was relying on an older estimate rather than a recent official measurement.

Sources

• AcademicInstitute for Economic Research (Romanian Academy) — Working Paper No. 39, R. PrelipceanuIt is estimated that by 2015, Romania had lost half of its doctors. Due to migration, some Eastern European countries, such as Poland, Latvia, and Romania, had ...
• SecondaryRomania InsiderRomania's brain drain: Half of Romania's doctors left the country between 2009 and 2015. Of the 231,000 employees currently working in the ...