Social ethics of global health recruitment
A DFG-funded research project of Christian Social Ethics
(2025–2028)
The project develops an overall picture of the socioethical challenges of international recruitment practices for healthcare professionals by distinguishing between three levels of actors:
Subproject 1
(Principal Investigator: Christof Mandry, Researcher: Moritz Broghammer, Goethe University Frankfurt/Main)
Subproject 1 examines the level of international regulation. It deals with existing agreements such as the WHO Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel and analyzes the roles and positions of the WHO, ILO, and private international recruitment organizations.
Subproject 2
(Principal Investigator: Bernhard Emunds, Researcher:Lisa Neubauer, Phil.-Theol. Hochschule Sankt Georgen)
Subproject 2 analyzes the recruitment of skilled personnel by actors in the German healthcare system. It investigates the ethical profile of the practices of recruitment and integration of church and other non-state actors, as well as their political regulation.
Subproject 3
(Principal Investigator: Jonas Hagedorn, Researcher: Leonie Uliczka, Faculty of Theology, Paderborn)
Subproject 3 contributes the perspective of a country of origin of healthcare professionals by examining the interaction between state and private actors in the recruitment of healthcare professionals from Mexico and its effects on– among other things– the Mexican healthcare system.
All three subprojects work closely together and follow a joint methodological approach that leads from descriptive to evaluative and finally to normative-prescriptive steps and reflections. The descriptive clarification of the central framework conditions is followed by an empirical assessment of the issues and the state of the debate. For this purpose, a discourse analysis is carried out in subproject 1; in subprojects 2 & 3, the analysis is based on expert interviews.
In the subsequent ethical evaluation, these are assessed within the framework of social science discussions and systematized with reference to social ethical theory formation. The final normative-prescriptive step involves the development of an integrative social-ethical concept, critically examining the systematized results of the previous steps. Finally, criteria for evaluating political options for action at all three levels of actors are developed and recommendations for concrete political measures are derived.
Contact
General (press) inquiries
Heike Probst
Press and Public Relations Officer
Faculty of Theology, Paderborn
Phone: +49 5251 121-720
Email: h.probst@thf-paderborn.de
Mobile: +49 176 56964717
Inquiries about specific technical topics
The complete list of team members with their respective areas of responsibility can be found here: