Global health and care worker compact
technical guidance compilation
Overview
Health and care workers need safe, healthy, supportive and dignified conditions of work. The Global health and care worker compact provides recommendations on how to protect health and care workers and safeguard their rights; and to promote and ensure decent work, free from racial and all other forms of discrimination; and to provide a safe and enabling practice environment. A wide range of existing international conventions, instruments, treaties and resolutions (collectively, “legal instruments”) inform these recommendations, ranging from human rights, labour rights, humanitarian law and other treaties to United Nations declarations, the WHO Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel and the WHO Global Strategy on Human Resources for Health 2016–2030. Each section includes extensive referencing to the relevant legal and other normative instruments, offering a compendium of references for further technical guidance as appropriate.
The care compact sets out complementary management and policy actions structured around four domains, namely: preventing harm; ensuring inclusivity; providing support; and safeguarding rights.
World Health Assembly Resolution WHA 74.14 requested the development of this global health and care worker compact to provide a succinct compilation, based on already existing documents of relevant international organizations, that aims at providing Member States, stakeholders and other organizations with technical guidance on how to “protect health and care workers and safeguard their rights, and to promote and ensure decent work, free from racial and all other forms of discrimination and a safe and enabling practice environment, in line with the WHO Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel. Member States approved the technical guidance in World Health Assembly Resolution WHA 75.17.
