The ethics of recruiting foreign-trained healthcare workers

Abstract

Canada’s active immigration policy includes thousands of internationally trained health workers arriving annually. The effective utilization of these workers represents an ethical issue relevant to the WHO’s Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel, to which Canada is a signatory. The ethical obligation for Canadian healthcare stakeholders is to continuously improve systems of credential evaluation and subsequent workplace integration to maximize immigrant health worker skills utilization and invest in better workforce data to meet Canada’s ethical obligations regarding health workforce sustainability.