Health Professionals’ Efflux to Western Countries: Could Human Rights and Pragmatism Justify Recruitment by Receiving Countries?
Posted: 10 May 2014
Date Written: May 7, 2014
Abstract
Mainstream scholarship holds that it is unethical for Western countries to recruit health professionals from third world nations. This notion is based on the thinking that in luring third world physicians and nurses to the Western world, destination countries greatly contribute to worsening the health of the people in developing countries by wrongfully depriving them of the services of health professionals whose cost of training they funded. Despite its seeming 'credibility' and pervasiveness, this opinion can be faulted on at least three grounds. First, it ignores the interplay of supply and demand in many of the exporting countries, an interplay that detrimentally impacts not only individual interests of the health professionals and their families but also the economies of their countries. Second, the opinion seems to have been constructed in total disregard of the human rights of the health professionals, particularly their right to respect for individual autonomy. Third, the notion fails to take into account the role of the principle of international cooperation (a key human rights concept) in relation amongst nations as supportive of the action of destination countries. This paper, a radical departure from extant orthodoxy, argues that when situated in its proper context, these neglected considerations provide sufficient justification for recruitment of health professionals from developing countries, even in the face of so-called shortages in many of these countries.
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