5 questions for Ann-Christin Wedeking

Mrs. Wedeking, what are your tasks as Head of the Office of the Quality Assurance Association?

My main task is of course to implement the quality assurance system. This includes organising and holding committee meetings and specialist events for members, as well as advising any interested parties who want to be certified with the RAL Quality Mark in the future. Alongside its many other tasks, the Office of the Quality Assurance Association is also the first point of contact for reporting suspected violations of the quality criteria.

What is the main objective of the RAL Quality Assurance Association for the Recruitment and Placement of Care Workers from Abroad? And what work is carried out to achieve this objective?

The main objective of the Quality Assurance Association for the Recruitment and Placement of Care Workers from Abroad is to guarantee a fair and ethically responsible recruitment process. The Quality Assurance Association awards the RAL Quality Mark for Fair Recruitment Healthcare Germany for this purpose. It is a quality assurance tool for private personal service agencies and those institutions that carry out their own recruitment. It aims to protect care workers and provide guidance to employers who want to engage the services of a personal service agency for the recruitment of staff. The main focus is placed on making the structures and services transparent to all those involved.

What legal regulations exist for the recruitment and placement of care workers from abroad and does the RAL Quality Mark go above and beyond them? If the answer is yes, to what extent?

The RAL Quality Mark is a hybrid quality mark that is based on the German law to guarantee quality in the recruitment of care workers from abroad. The German Employment Ordinance (Beschäftigungsverordnung, §§ 38 and 39) also includes a regulation that partially implements the WHO Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel, i.e. by banning the recruitment of health personnel from certain countries (Health Workforce Support and Safeguards List). The RAL Quality Mark also requires compliance with the so-called “Employer Pays Principle”, i.e. the agency fee and the costs associated with the recruitment of staff are borne by the employer and not transferred to the migrating care worker. This requirement goes above and beyond the legal regulation for the recruitment of workers in the sense of § 296 of the German Social Code (SGB III). Other legal requirements are defined in the Immigration Act for Skilled Workers (Fachkräfteeinwanderungsgesetz), the Act on the Residence, Economic Activity and Integration of Foreigners in the Federal Territory (Aufenthaltsgesetz) and the Nursing Professions Act (Pflegeberufegesetz).

The demand for inpatient and outpatient care workers in Germany has been increasing for many years and will continue to grow in the future. What influence has that had on your work and that of the RAL Quality Assurance Association?

Recruiting specialist care workers from abroad can only ever be one part of the solution for counteracting the increasing lack of specialist workers. The RAL Quality Assurance Association for the Recruitment and Placement of Care Workers from Abroad is committed to ensuring that this process is based on ethically responsible and fair criteria. In order to ensure that this recruitment process is sustainable, it is essential that all of the people involved in the process are aware of their responsibilities. For example, employers are responsible for organizing how care workers from abroad are integrated into their new jobs.

What is needed to effectively combat the crisis in the care worker sector? What are your wishes for the future?

We can only counteract the current crisis in the care worker sector by implementing numerous mutually supportive measures, of which the recruitment of workers from abroad is only one of them. In order to improve the situation with regard to the recruitment of specialist care workers from abroad, the Quality Assurance Association believes that it will be necessary to simplify and speed up immigration processes for these specialist workers and the processes for the subsequent recognition of qualifications in the care and nursing profession. The RAL Quality Assurance Association published a position paper on this theme in January this year.