Law, Healthcare Migration, and the Maintenance of International Health Disparities

Dr Priyasha Saksena will be speaking on how The Covid-19 pandemic laid bare the critical shortage of healthcare workers across the world. In many developed countries, workforce shortages are plugged by immigrant healthcare workers, recruited largely from the global south. The permanent emigration of trained healthcare workers may, however, have a potentially serious impact on the ability of countries to manage the health of their populations. The "problem" of healthcare worker migration is therefore often framed as one around the right to health versus the right of individual healthcare workers to move across borders. At the international level, stakeholders have attempted to balance these rights through the adoption of voluntary instruments such as the World Health Organization Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personne