This is the first of two stories from a reportage to Romania the other week. Despite a nearly open labour market across Europe, medical professionals in one of the continant's poorest countries are choosing to stay home.
Romania's nurses stick close to home
Romania's nurses don't earn much and although they can work almost anywhere in Europe, better salaries may not be enough to lure them away from home.
The former Eastern Bloc country of 22 million seems an ideal picking ground for cheap medical professionals for Switzerland.
And it could be, if voters choose to extend a labour agreement with the European Union to new members Romania and Bulgaria on February 8.
"I think they want to stay in the country but they are not very well paid here. And the work is not so easy," says Lamise Bectemir, the head of the paediatric oncology ward at the Marie Curie Children's Hospital in the Romanian capital, Bucharest.
There is a great wealth disparity here. The problem for Bectemir and others who consider themselves part of the middle class is that relatively meagre salaries don't translate into low costs of living. Nurses in Romania earn between €500 (SFr750) and €1,000 per month.
At a McDonald's restaurant a few minutes from the hospital, a hamburger meal costs around 18 lei, or roughly SFr6.50 ($5.60).
That's less than half the price of the same sandwich, French fries and soft drink in Switzerland, but for the city's nurses it is a relative luxury. They could earn up to five times more in a Swiss hospital.
Romania's wages are an expression of the country's ongoing growing pains almost two decades after the collapse of Nicolae Ceauşescu's communist regime.
For all the talk of new money in Eastern Europe, Bucharest's buildings cast a weary shadow and its prodigious boulevards and traffic circles - crumbling edifices to the former dictator's brand of grandiose totalitarianism - teem with a few luxury trucks and many more of the modest Dacias, the national everyman's car.