The number of foreign doctors in Germany has doubled in the past decade, reaching 63,763 at the end of last year.

Ten years ago, there were about 30 thousand, and in 1993 there were about 10 thousand, according to statistics from the German Medical Association.

The majority of doctors without German passports come from EU countries or other European countries, as well as from the Middle East.

The most common countries of origin are Syria (6,120), Romania (4,668), Austria (2,993), Greece (2,943), Russia (2,941), and Turkey (2,628). The total number of doctors in Germany was 557,528 at the end of 2022.

In the past decade, over 3,000 doctors have left Albania, according to the federation of Albanian doctors in Europe. At least 1,000 of them work in Germany.

Representatives of doctors warn of increasing problems due to poor German language skills among foreign colleagues.

“Inadequate language skills are already a massive problem today,” said the managing director of the State Medical Association of Rhineland-Palatinate, Jürgen Hoffart.

“But it will worsen in the coming years because we will have more and more foreign doctors.”

According to Hoffart, one reason is the lack of doctors. In the future, the need for personnel in medicine cannot be met with students trained at German universities.

Out of about 11 thousand graduates in Germany every year, a significant number do not enter the workforce.