HUBOL representatives called on the health administration to take measures to motivate doctors to stay in the country.
"When you say that 220 doctors have left Croatia, that may not seem a lot, but Croatia is currently short of 2,000 to 3,000 doctors so every doctor who leaves is a huge loss," said HUBOL vice-president Ada Baric.
Doctors leave the country with their families, planning to stay abroad for good, and most of them are aged 35-45, she said.
Croatian doctors mostly go to work in Germany, Austria, Ireland, England, Sweden, the United Arab Emirates and the United States.
"The main reason they are leaving is not money, despite what most people believe, but their huge dissatisfaction with working conditions that are not regulated by a collective work agreement, excessive overtime work, the fact that the amount of work done by one doctor should be done by three doctors, exhaustion and the lack of opportunities for additional training and promotion," said Baric.
Nonetheless, HUBOL believes that it is not too late to prevent the exodus of doctors, noting that this requires a consensus with doctors' representatives and their umbrella associations so that dignified working conditions could be ensured for them.
Another HUBOL vice-president, Ivana Smit, said the number of doctors who have left the country was up 140-150% compared to a year ago.
According to a survey conducted by HUBOL in 2014, anesthesiologists (18) and internists (15) leave the country the most. A significant number of medical professors, assistant professors and holders of PhD degrees have left the country as well, Smit said, adding that medical professionals should be appointed to be in charge of administrative decisions regarding the medical profession.
Speaking about the demographic consequences of emigration, a professor at the Zagreb Faculty of Science, Stjepan Sterc, said that the ongoing emigration wave could result in 450,000 people leaving the country.
An additional problem, compared to emigration in the past century, is that the most educated part of the population is leaving, said Sterc.
The Health Ministry said in a statement today that in the period from Croatia's accession to the EU to the end of the first quarter of 2015, 336 medical workers had left the country, which accounts for 0.7% of all employees in the health sector.
The ministry noted that over the past year it had adopted and started implementing a number of measures to ensure the best possible working conditions for doctors.
"One should underline that the emigration is a result of Croatia's accession to the EU and the possibility for doctors to work in other countries, and this is not unique to Croatia," the ministry said in a comment on HUBOL's news conference.
According to the ministry's data, between 1 July 2013 and the end of the first quarter of 2015, 234 doctors, 98 nurses, two medical biochemists, one midwife and one health worker had left the country. In the same period 839 medical workers requested documents enabling them to look for work abroad, less than 2% of the total number of medical workers, said the ministry.
It said that its human resources management strategy contained eight concrete measures, that rules on bonuses for doctors were being defined, that it was using EU funds to financially stimulate doctors to go and work in rural areas where there is a shortage of doctors and that it planned to enable young doctors to take subsidised housing loans with very low interest rates.