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Free movements of medical professionals: policy and planning

The target for member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to implement the ASEAN Economic Community in 2015 has raised concerns on how the free movements of health professionals would come into practice. After the Declaration on the AEC Blueprint was signed by heads of the member states in 2008, the ministries of commerce met in Cha-am, Petchaburi, Thailand, in 2009, to proceed on the Mutual Recognition Arrangement (MRA) on medical professionals. Several joint coordinating committees have worked on further details for medicine, dentistry and nursing. So far, the implementation of roadmap to facilitate free mobility of healthcare professionals within ASEAN is progressing but reaches some consensus on minor points. Further discussions are needed.

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Correspondence to Prasobsri Ungthavorn.

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This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

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Ungthavorn, P. Free movements of medical professionals: policy and planning. BMC Public Health 14 (Suppl 1), I4 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2458-14-S1-I4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2458-14-S1-I4

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