“Scaling healthcare innovation requires involving healthcare professionals.”

Voices from the Data2Value Executive Dialogue: Dorte Bøe Danbjørg, President and Chief Nursing Representative, Danish Nurses’ Association.

Dorte Bøe Danbjørg, President and Chief Nursing Representative of the Danish Nurses’ Association, identified a challenge that sits at the heart of healthcare transformation across Europe – not the absence of innovation, but the difficulty of moving it beyond isolated progress and into systems at scale

“We have to remember to involve healthcare professionals so they are not afraid of all the changes that are coming.”

Beyond technology and infrastructure

The barrier Danbjørg points to is neither technical nor financial. Digital initiatives that bypass the people delivering care risk producing solutions that are operationally fragile. Involving healthcare professionals in the process of change, she argues, is not a soft consideration – it is a structural one.

Learning across borders

Her answer is direct. Scaling innovation requires two things working in parallel: health systems must learn more systematically from each other’s experience, and professionals must be part of the process rather than asked to adapt to its outcomes after the fact. “We must be better at learning from each other,” she said. Cross-border exchange of what works remains underdeveloped relative to the scale of the challenge.

Professionals as a condition for success

For Danbjørg, healthcare professionals are not an obstacle to manage in the transformation of health systems. They are central to making it work.

Dorte Bøe Danbjørg is President and Chief Nursing Representative of the Danish Nurses’ Association and a participant in the Data2Value Executive Dialogue, Copenhagen, May 18, 2026.