‘Sustainable Recruitment’ of Foreign-Educated Nurses: Ethical and Work Related Issues. The Case of Finland

The international migration – and recruitment of health professionals has gained momentum in the last fifteen years, becoming a matter of international concern. Work-related issues – i.e. working conditions, integration and retention of foreign-educated health professionals – have emerged along with (old) issues of ethical recruitment. This paper focuses on the recruitment of foreign-educated nurses (FENs) and contributes to the current debate on approaches to international recruitment and labour market integration of health professionals by introducing the concept of ‘sustainable recruitment’, which binds together ethical recruitment and work-related issues. This study aims to investigate the ways these aspects actually or potentially shape current approaches of international recruitment. A qualitative approach is used to study the case of Finland, which is an emerging destination country of FNEs and that has started to recruit nurses both from within the European Union and in the Philippines. In particular the paper presents and discusses the results of an empirical investigation carried out in Finland in 2015 that was aimed at exploring whether and how private and public health care organizations and private recruitment agencies are responding to issues of ‘sustainable recruitment’ while recruiting FENs internationally.