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Human Rights and Global Justice

Lawrence O. Gostin, JD

JAMA. 2008;299(15):1827-1829.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

The international migration of health care workers—physicians, nurses, midwives, and pharmacists—leaves the world's poorest countries with severe human resource shortages, seriously jeopardizing the achievement of the UN Health Millennium Development Goals.¹ Advocates for global health call active recruitment in low-income countries a crime.^2-3 Despite the pronounced international concern, there is little research and few solutions.⁴ This Commentary focuses on the international recruitment of internationally educated nurses (IENs) from the perspective of human rights and global justice.

Misdistribution of Health Care Workers

Although the World Health Assembly calls the human resource shortage "a crisis in health,"⁵ leading to the creation of the Global Health Workforce Alliance, no international or national agency is charged with quantifying or solving the problem. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 4.3 million more health care workers are required to meet the Health Millennium Development Goals, identifying 57 countries with critical shortages. Thirty-six of these countries are . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Author Affiliation: O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, DC.