Aspen Global Health and Development

Health Worker Migration Initiative

The Problem 

The current global shortage of health workers impedes access to basic health services around the world. Medical advances and older populations in industrialized nations have led to serious health workforce shortages that are projected to last for decades to come. But within this international shortage, gaping inequities exist between countries.

In many poor developing nations, the health workforce crisis is exacerbated by the migration of health practitioners to developed nations, which are increasingly reliant on foreign workers to provide access to health services for their own population.

Consider:

• Africa carries 25% of the world’s disease burden yet has only 3% of the world’s health workers.
• Developed countries’ reliance on foreign-trained health workers exacerbates the crisis; for example, an estimated 24% of physicians and 16% of nurses in the US are foreign-trained.

The international migration of health workers will continue to meet part of this increased demand; yet, we must search for ways to mitigate its negative effects on countries that need health workers the most.

The Health Worker Migration Initiative (HWMI)

HWMI identifies and promotes innovative policies to address the growing global challenge of inequitable healthcare access due to the migration of health workers, highlighting promising practices at the global, regional, and country level.

Among these innovations are adoption of policies including ethical codes of conduct and bilateral agreements between source and destination nations where training, technical assistance, development assistance and circular and temporary migration allow a return flow of resources to sending nations with low health worker density.

HWMI is the secretariat of The Health Worker Migration Global Policy Advisory Council (“Council”), a taskforce of high level policy makers from sending and receiving nations and experts that was established in 2007 to review and promote global, regional, and national policy action to support the more ethical management of global health worker migration.  The Council was reconstituted in 2011 with the primary mandate of assessing the implementation of the WHO Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel in addition to promoting innovative solutions to addressing the challenges associated with health worker migration.

Read the Council Mandate