In its judgment, the Federal Administrative Court (the Court) dismissed the appeal of an Austrian national against a partial decision of the Swiss Red Cross (SRC) dated 10 February 2026, confirming that recognition of her Slovak nursing qualification as equivalent to the Swiss "dipl. Pflegefachfrau HF" required compensatory measures.

The appellant held a 1987 nursing certificate from a secondary healthcare school in Bratislava, then Czechoslovakia. In 2024, she applied to the SRC for recognition of her qualification as a nurse in Switzerland. The SRC made recognition conditional on an adaptation course or an aptitude test, finding that her training differed substantially in duration and content from the Swiss reference qualification.

The Court confirmed that Directive 2005/36/EC on the recognition of professional qualifications, incorporated via the Agreement on the Free Movement of Persons and implemented in art. 10 of the Health Professions Act (GesBG), applied. Automatic recognition under the sectoral system was unavailable, as her diploma was not listed in Annex V, point 5.2.2 of the Directive, and the conditions of art. 23 para. 3 for qualifications from the former Czechoslovakia were not met, as she had not practised the profession there for the required period. Under the general recognition regime, the Court held that the appropriate comparator was the current Swiss reference training rather than the training in place when she obtained her diploma, since recognition assesses whether a person can practise according to current standards. On this basis, the Court upheld the SRC's finding of a training shortfall of more than one year and significant content gaps in areas such as the nursing process, documentation, communication, and professional ethics, which neither her subsequent midwifery and social-work training nor her professional experience, primarily in gynaecology, could offset. The Court recalled that professional experience offsets such gaps only where it provided the missing competencies.

The Court accordingly held that the SRC had lawfully made recognition conditional on compensatory measures under art. 14 of the Directive, leaving the appellant a choice between an adaptation course and an aptitude test. It also found no undue delay in the proceedings.

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