Building the evidence base for nurse musculoskeletal health across Europe
Musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) are among the most common work-related health problems facing healthcare workers in Europe, yet the evidence base connecting specific nursing tasks, particularly patient handling and continence care, to MSD risk remained fragmented and difficult to act on.
The goal of this project was to move beyond anecdote and generate robust, comparable data across multiple countries that could support a credible policy case at EU level, timed to align with wider legislative attention on gender inequalities in health and workplace safety.
The challenge was significant: healthcare systems and nursing bodies vary widely across member states, existing regulation addresses the issue only in a piecemeal way, and any claims made would need to withstand scrutiny from policymakers, clinicians, and industry funders alike. Overstating causation, or appearing to isolate one clinical task unfairly, risked undermining the credibility the campaign needed to build.
We designed and ran a large-scale, multilingual survey distributed through a network of national nursing associations, translated into several major European languages to maximise reach and relevance.
The instrument was built to capture the realities of frontline practice, physical workload, staffing pressure, equipment availability, and symptom prevalence, while remaining simple enough for busy clinical staff to complete accurately.
We successfully received over 4,500 responses. We analysed responses at both the pan-European and country level and in parallel, we worked to secure an independent academic partner to lead a health economic modelling exercise, estimating the annual cost to healthcare systems of MSDs linked to patient handling, a deliverable designed to translate frontline data into the kind of figure that lands with policymakers and journalists alike.
Throughout, we kept a clear line between the industry funder underwriting the programme and the independent methodology of the academic partners, and worked closely with allied nursing unions and federations to build a coalition prepared to co-sign a shared position paper.
The survey comfortably exceeded its response targets across all priority countries, generating one of the more substantial pan-European datasets of its kind on this issue. The findings are now feeding directly into a position paper co-signed by leading European nursing and healthcare worker organisations, and into a forthcoming health economic model timed to coincide with a major EU parliamentary vote on health inequalities.
The work has also opened a parallel evidence stream: insights from the survey were fed into a European public health agency's consultation on infection prevention guidance, reframing nursing staffing levels as a structural risk factor in a related clinical domain.
Together, these outputs have positioned our client as a credible, evidence-led voice in an EU policy conversation that had previously lacked comparable cross-border data, turning a fragmented, anecdote-driven issue into one now anchored in original research.
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