Abstract

The migration of healthcare professionals from global south to the global north has intensified post-covid, raising significant concerns for the sustainability and health system resilience in sending countries. The 2022 economic crises in Sri Lanka marked a critical turning point in this trend, triggering a rapid acceleration in the mobility of Sri Lankan healthcare professionals to countries such as the United Kingdom.

This research examines the root causes of post-crisis brain drain among Sri Lankan healthcare professionals through the application of the Aspirations-Capabilities-Catalysts (ACC) framework. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with Sri Lankan healthcare professionals currently employed in the UK, the study explores how long-standing migration aspirations and gradually accumulated migration capabilities interacted with crisis conditions to produce sudden and decisive migration outcomes.

The findings indicate that migration aspirations and capabilities existed well before the 2022 crisis but were insufficient on their own to explain the timing of migration decisions. Instead, the economic crisis functioned as a third factor of activation, a catalyst, compressing decision-making horizons, intensifying uncertainty, and eroding trust in institutional recovery. This transformed latent or dormant migration potential into immediate action, often framed by participants as “now or never” decisions. This study offers a conceptual clarification by integrating insights from Lee’s push–pull framework and de Haas’s Aspirations-Capabilities framework into the ACC framework. In the ACC framework, the place of origin and the place of destination are reconceptualised as mixed catalytic environments rather than as sites of unidirectional push or pull. Both locations contain positive catalysts that activate migration as well as negative catalysts that restrain it.

This research argues that while de Haas’s Aspirations–Capabilities framework provides a robust account of agency and structure in migration decision-making, it is analytically limited in explaining crisis-driven activation processes. Aspirations–Capabilities framework formalises aspiration as the socially shaped desire to migrate, analytically distinct from the capabilities which are a stock of resources or permissions yet relatively limited emphasis on the activation moment-that is, the temporal and contextual conditions under which latent or dormant aspirations and capabilities are transformed into observable action. This gap suggests to reconceptualise aspirations and capabilities in migration scholarship as context-contingent and time sensitive potentials whose activation is shaped by the third dimension of catalyst. From this theoretical gap, the Aspiration-Capabilities-Catalysts framework emerges.

By foregrounding this reconceptualization, the study contributes to migration scholarship of healthcare professionals highlighting the importance of catalysts in workforce mobility during different contexts such as crises.

Keywords: Brain drain; Healthcare professionals; Human resources; Migration; Aspirations capabilities and catalysts; Economic crisis; Sri Lanka.