Overall messages

• Skilled health worker migration has emerged as a major issue in global policy making over the last decade. Global dialogue on skilled health worker migration takes place through a range of multilateral organisations, with different missions and remits, inside and outside the UN system
• Evolving global policy on migration for development, universal health coverage and HRH in the post‐2015 development agenda are shaping global dialogue on HRH migration in tangible ways.
• Global governance on HRH migration has led to a range of global, regional and bilateral mechanisms resulting in varying levels of cooperation and policy development. They include normative frameworks for rights‐based approaches to migration, voluntary codes on ethical recruitment with a specific focus on HRH in source countries, diasporic initiatives aimed at ‘brain gain’ and development for source countries, data and forecasting on future HRH requirements, measures to ‘scale up’ HRH in source countries, and regional and bilateral agreements and partnerships on HRH migration, amongst others.
• This report argues that integrated and coordinated global responses are needed to address a range of policy issues concerning workforce planning, retention of health workers and mechanisms to ensure that source countries benefit from migration in ways that are proportionate to the benefits gained by destination countries. These are complex, multifaceted issues to address, not least because of the different policy domains under which global health and global migration have evolved, differences in health policy and financing in high‐, medium‐ and low income countries, and unequal economic and social development.Articulating what the ‘right to health’ and the ‘right to migrate’ mean in this context is equally complex.
• An overriding message from this report is that better are needed systems for: monitoring and capturing HRH requirements and HRH migration flows in source and destination countries; enforcing and monitoring ethical recruitment practices; ensuring that source countries benefit from global financial and technical assistance on HRH across a health system; facilitating reciprocal HRH arrangements and partnerships between source and destination countries; and promoting multistakeholder alliances and partnerships. It raises key questions about how to progress HRH migration policy in the context of global health, shared/global social responsibility, ethical recruitment and rights‐based approaches to migration.

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