This year, more than 100 students from all over Europe attended the European Student congress in Dublin. From all over Europe? Well, not quite. In recent years, we've had some problems recruiting students from several countries, even a few with otherwise highly active and motivated IPPNW affiliates. While countries like Sweden, Finland, Norway, Austria, Russia, Germany and Estonia have managed to maintain high student membership (in Germany, for example, students make up more than 10% of the total members), some other countries have not.  Here's a map, showing the current centres of student activity in Europe.

The situation is especially worrying in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Hungary, Spain, Luxembourg, Poland, Switzerland, Portugal, Serbia-Montenegro, Slovakia and Italy. This development might not seem to influence the work of IPPNW right now, but it will have serious repercussions in the future, when finding interested physicians to continue IPPNW's mission will pose an even greater problem than today.

We, as European Student Representatives have talked about this problem many times and have, in close cooperation with Herman Spanjaard, the European President of IPPNW, come up with a concrete plan to combat this situation, aptly named the "Europan Student Recruitment Campaign 2004". 

This campaign is planned to start coming fall semester, after final planning will have been completed during the Beijing World Congress. It will combine different strategies, which have been shown to work in local or national recruitment campaigns in the past. Now, we will take these initiatives to a European level.

The first step of the campaign will be to contact former student members in the respective countries in order to get their ideas and input on how such a campaign could be realized in their affiliates. In the Netherlands, in Serbia-Montenegro or in Spain there have formerly been very active student members (some of whom even acted as regional or international student representatives). If we could win these students to support our campaign, we could use their experiences and contacts to make great progress in their respective countries.

Next, we will publish a number of informative publications such as posters and flyers, which should be in English and easy to copy and send by mail so that we can rely on helpers in the different regions to dublicate and distribute them. For financial backing, we will ask some of the European affiliates, while the amount needed will not be too much. These posters and flyers would have to include contact adresses and our homepage, as well as focus on concrete projects, such as NWIP or MedEx, ReCap or next year's European student congress. By giving students a broad idea of what IPPNW is all about and combining this with a concrete project, the probability of a recruitment success will increase, as similar campaigns have shown in recent years. Instead of asking them to "inform themselves and start a local group", as we've done (unsuccessfully) in the past, we would give them the opportunity to "work in a Refugee Camp" (with ReCap), "practice and learn abroad" (with MedEx) or "meet and discuss nuclear topics with Indian and Pakistani students" (with NWIP).

In addition to these publications, we will start off the Recruitment Campaign with this new website, where participants in the campaign can exchange ideas, plans and success-stories, communicate problems they've been having or post the results of their initiatives. There will also be a page including informations for interested new-comers, cited on the publications and with links to the main student homepage and other IPPNW sites. "Ask, what IPPNW can do for you, then ask how you can get it involved." could be the heading of such a page.

Next, the active student members all over Europe, as well as the physicians of all affiliates will be informed about the campaign through e-mails and asked to participate. We can then provide them with publications and ideas on how to go about recruiting members. Through the website, they could communicate their progress, receive tips and motivation from successes of other people and see the campaign developing.

The actual "field work" will be done in two ways. First, we want to have former students (physisicans) in the different countries visiting universities in an attempt to distribute flyers and posters and spread the word about IPPNW. This could mean communicating with the medical student representatives or deans of students at the universities or just simply hanging up the posters where students can see them. In some universities, it would surely also be possible to offer a lecture on "A physician's social responsibility" or something similar, depending on the connections, which our "field-workers" have to the university.

Secondly, we would institute a twinning-program, where students from a country with IPPNW activity visit students in countries, where we don't have any members yet. Several viable possibilities for such twinnings are German students visiting Poland, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands or Belgium or the students involved in the NWIP program visiting students in Spain, Belgium, Russia, France or the UK, where they were planning to host meetings anyways. There's bound to be more ways in which such twinnings would be possible (exchange students, etc.), if we can only motivate the students to participate in the campaign and provide them with materials they could use.

We would then try to keep new members active by supporting interested students through invitations to congresses, visits, information materials and, most importantly, by asking them to participate in projects such as NWIP. We've come to the conclusion that expecting students to start up new IPPNW groups from scratch is a lot to ask for and that by introducing single students to the organization through participation in programs or by inviting them to congresses, we can ultimately reach more people than if we just wait for students to organize themselves locally, without ever having had the chance to meet other IPPNW students in person or to have worked in IPPNW projects. 

While the long-term goal would be to expand the IPPNW student movement to countries all over Europe, the concrete goal of this campaign is to identify interested students in the different countries and to invite them to next year’s European Student Congress, where we could then reflect on the campaign (which will by then have lasted half a year), decide on the next steps and evaluate the progress made so far. This progress, which the campaign is making towards this goal would also be published on this website.

If Dublin has shown us anything it is that there's a number of interested students out there all over Europe, who just haven't heard of us yet. Similarly, there are a ot of active medical students in other organizations, such as IFMSA; seeking a broader political agenda. A recruitment campaign such as the one we’re planning, which would not only include students, but also physicians from countries with low student participation, might be just the right way to ensure continuous student activity and lay the foundation for future generations of IPPNW physicians within Europe, while at the same time getting them acquainted directly with the experienced physician members. We hope to win the backing of some of the European Affiliates and be able to motivate physicians and students throughout the continent to participate in the campaign.

Please direct any comments, remarks or questions to esrc@ippnw-students.org

Richard Fristedt and Alex Rosen

European Student Representatives