How can we increase international recruitment of health professionals?
Project Summary
Healthcare systems across the world are facing a critical shortage of nurses, threatening patient care and service delivery. The MoRe (Megastudy on Recruitment) project is a collaboration between The People Lab, the King Frederik Center for Public Leadership at Aarhus University in Denmark, and Danish healthcare providers to develop and test interventions aimed at recruiting nurses and nursing assistants from the broader European labor market to work in Denmark.
Why is this issue important?
Staffing shortages are one of the most pressing issues in healthcare across the world. The World Health Organization estimates that there is a global shortage of approximately 6 million nurses, which is expected to increase to 11 million by 2030. These shortages threaten service delivery, patient safety, and continuity of care.
What are we doing?
In collaboration with researchers from Aarhus University and Danish healthcare providers, we designed and conducted a large-scale “megastudy” (n=110,000) to test the effectiveness of outreach messages aimed at recruiting nurses and nursing assistants from across the European labor market to Denmark. Using a novel, community-led intervention design, we developed recruitment messages by balancing three sources of expertise—academics, human resources practitioners, and nurses—to jointly co-create and select the intervention messages to be tested. This participatory process produced ten distinct messages highlighting different employer value propositions.
Participants were randomly assigned to receive one of ten message variants or no message. We delivered messages through social media job platforms using direct, personalized outreach and measured engagement by whether recipients responded or clicked a shared link to a recruitment landing page, where they could express interest in employer contact and sign up for targeted job information.
What have we learned?
This project is ongoing, with results expected in early 2026.
What comes next?
This project is currently in the design phase. An overview of the project can be found here. We expect the field experiment to begin in 2024.