Dataharvest 2026 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

Trusting your doctor is something you should be able to take for granted. Bad Practice, a collaboration co-led by OCCRP, The Times of London, and VG of Norway, exposed a European health scandal that has brought that into question.

The project identified at least 100 doctors who had been banned from practicing by medical regulators in one country but remained licensed to work in another. The stories have had a major impact, with governments across Europe and the European Commission pledging to crack down on the issue.

While a lot of cross-border projects rely on a central leak, this project required us to build a dataset from scratch by obtaining as many lists of doctors' licenses and doctors' medical disciplines as possible. This session will set out how we were able to make these findings, and the lessons we learned from building our database from fragmented records across jurisdictions, and then, once we identified likely matches, how we proved these doctors were still practicing. We would explain what went well, what didn't, and our ambitions for the future of the project as we add more countries from around the world to our database.

Attendees need no prior knowledge, just an interest in how to build cross-border investigations into regulated professions.