Global Governance Policy Addressing Brain Drain: Promoting Health Equity and Justice

Brain drain resulting from imbalance in health worker migration from resource-poor countries to developed countries represents a serious global health crisis that endangers health equity and gives rise to bioethical issues.  Developed countries rely upon annual health worker outflow from countries already burdened with inadequate health infrastructure, capacity, and global disease burden, resulting in millions of dollars in health investment losses as poor countries cross-subsidize rich nations. Though a number of strategies have been explored to address this global injustice, imbalances remain and continue to endanger the stability of public health systems globally. In response, the establishment of a Global Health Resource Fund in conjunction with an international framework for health worker migration can create global governance policy to promote appropriate investment in health infrastructure to improve worker conditions, retain workers, and assess present and future resource-poor country needs to address brain drain from the standpoint of ethics and equity.

This abstract is extremely important to the current discourse of establishing global health governance and health policy solutions to address health worker “brain drain.”  The presentation outlines the ongoing struggle of resource-poor countries in retaining and recruiting health workers and the resulting negative public health effects of failure to address this inequitable resource allocation. To address these bioethical and equity issues, challenges and explore opportunities in improving global health care, we propose a comprehensive global health governance policy which advocates for the development of a global health resource fund operated by a collaborative partnership between the WHO and World Bank. It would provide sustained infrastructure for funding and equitable redistribution of resources to improve working conditions in resource-poor countries and also provide a formalized immigration pathways for workers, based on developed country fees that reflect their benefits from heath worker migration.