ArticleBMJ open2026
Indirect participant recruitment and representativeness in healthcare workforce research: lessons from a comparative study of the SCOHPICA cohort.
Article in BMJ open, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectivesTo assess the representativeness of participants recruited through indirect methods into a cohort of healthcare professionals in the absence of comprehensive and up-to-date national registers.
designComparisons of socio-demographic and socio-professional characteristics from multiple national data sources with those of a large indirectly recruited healthcare workforce cohort.
settingNational healthcare workforce research conducted in Switzerland as a case study, with lessons applicable to other high-income countries lacking comprehensive registers.
participantsHealthcare professionals across 10 professional groups, with data drawn from 14 administrative, institutional, professional and research sources collected between 2016 and 2023, alongside participants from the 2022-2023 baseline recruitment waves of the Swiss Cohort of Healthcare Professionals and Informal Caregivers (SCOHPICA).
main outcome measuresComparisons of age, sex, spoken language, training country, activity rate, working hours and sector of practice across available datasets.
resultsBroad similarities were observed in sex distribution between indirectly recruited participants and external data sources. However, discrepancies emerged in age profiles, linguistic distribution and certain profession-specific variables. These variations reflected both genuine diversity within the population and inconsistencies between available datasets.
conclusionsSCOHPICA illustrates that in the absence of comprehensive and up-to-date registers, indirect participant recruitment can provide rich, diverse and generally comparable data on healthcare professionals, though representativeness cannot be definitively established. Such investigations offer valuable insights for monitoring and planning healthcare workforces internationally while underscoring the need for improved national registers and standardised workforce indicators.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.