The Code for Recruitment of Health Workers Under Review at the WHO: A Moment of Promise or Just Status Quo? [WHA79]

Readers,

Working on today's edition brought to mind Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte, his painting of a pipe, but with a caption that says "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("This is not a pipe."). There is always subtext, more than what you see.

What does this got to do with Global Health? Our story today is about the review of the Code to recruit health personnel. But as we tried to understand this topic, it is clear that this is more than the Code itself. Indeed, while efforts are to make specific, targeted, new additions to the text of the code, the wider context including the compulsions of demographics, vast inequities, the lack of resources, taxation policies, human rights and migration, all come to bear on this technical discussion.

Riveting as it is to report on global health, but the many layers in this field can be mind boggling. Really.

There are two parts to this comprehensive edition. Part 1: An introduction to the code and the significance of this review. Part II: On the dynamics in the current negotiation on the resolution.

My colleague, Maged Iskarous, a health systems specialist, has laid out why the review of the code is a significant opportunity to strengthen the operationalisation of the code. (He is a part of our annual fellowship program from 2025.)

He argues that "these efforts should not be seen as a mere procedural footnote but as a political inflection point. The WHO has formally moved from celebrating the Code’s principles to interrogating its implementation failure."

For this story, I reviewed documents, and conducted several interviews in Geneva to get an understanding of the ongoing negotiations on the resolution.

Thanks for reading. This edition has been many weeks in the making!

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I. GHF ANALYSIS: WHA79

The Code for Recruitment of Health Workers Under Review at the WHO: A Moment of Promise or Just Status Quo?

By Maged Iskarous & Priti Patnaik

Part I: Significance of the Review of the Code

More than fifteen years after its adoption, the WHO Global Code of Practice remains ethically sound but operationally weak.

At WHO’s Executive Board Meeting in February 2026, Member States adopted a decision to launch Member State–led consultations anchored in a WHO-mandated Expert Advisory Group (EAG) review, ahead of WHA79 (May 2026).

The move signals that voluntary norms have not kept pace with today’s realities—recurrent health emergencies, widening workforce inequities, and sustained dependence on international recruitment. This makes consultations on the review of the code a rare opportunity to translate ethics into practice, even as there is pressure to keep any revision narrowly targeted.