The Ottawa Hospital is launching a recruitment drive that acknowledges the frustrations expressed by many Ontario nurses over the last three years.

The institution’s new “Opportunity Calls Hotline” is a resource for nurses who, despite their passion for their careers, feel like they have to leave the profession to escape the factors that have led to a pervasive feeling of burnout.

The work is informed by Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario (RNAO) insights that reveal that 42% of nurses report they were planning on leaving the profession altogether or retiring. Last year in Ontario, 9,000 nurses exited the profession, leaving 661 per 100,000 people in the province, far below the Canadian average of 825. And while Bill 124 – which limited pay increases for Ontario nurses since 2019 – was recently struck down, issues such as under-staffing still remain.

Associated OOH is targeting nurses outside hospitals with giant wild posters featuring the slogan “Thank you nursing heroes,” a common refrain during the COVID-19 pandemic, that has been struck out with red spray paint and replaced with a phone number.

The hotline offers pathways and opportunities available to nurses as they move throughout their career; the different roles they can choose within the nursing field and hear real-life stories from nurses currently working in those areas. It also includes information for nursing students about their options and engaging internationally trained nurses eager to work in Ontario, and how The Ottawa Hospital can help guide the process. There is also an advisor available to talk through the options in person.

The ads also feature an open letter telling nurses why The Ottawa Hospital is launching the hotline initiative, which is also explained in an online video.

As Devon Williamson, co-founder and chief creative officer for Berners Bowie Lee (BBL) explains, it was important to bust category convention of “hero” slogans in order to break through, or run the risk that its “target won’t notice the communication, because it looks like everything else and sounds like everything else, and it’s a waste of money to put media dollars toward that.”

“We’ve done something that’s not as disposable as [just] advertising, and it actually longer term, will make a real difference about how nurses feel about their jobs,” says Michael Murray, co-founder and CCO of Berners Bowie Lee, which began its work with The Ottawa Hospital around this time last year.

“We interviewed a lot of nurses,” Murray says, part of what he calls “culture mapping,” and he tells strategy it talked to adjacent professions as well. “It’s not necessarily they hate being called ‘heroes.’ What it is is there’s a gap between told they’re heroes and the reality of their jobs, which are actually very hard and there’s a lot of burnout.”

Williamson tells strategy the media was highly targeted, all near hospitals, in high traffic areas in the vicinity of hospitals or where student nurses might be. The digital, search and social buy was also very targeted, and handled in-house.