A fresh study from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing suggests that, apart from retirement, nurses often leave healthcare jobs due to poor working conditions. This comes as hospital executives are increasingly concerned about staffing issues.

“Prior studies evaluate nurses’ intentions to leave their job. Our study is one of the few evaluating why nurses actually left health care employment entirely,” the researchers explain.

The study, which examined 7,887 registered nurses in New York and Illinois who left healthcare jobs from 2018 to 2021, found that planned retirement was the primary reason for departure across various healthcare settings such as hospitals, long-term care facilities, and ambulatory care centers.

Reasons for leaving

Following retirement, other major reasons for leaving included inadequate staffing, burnout, and challenges in maintaining work-life balance. Interestingly, among retired nurses surveyed, only 59% indicated that their retirement was planned, hinting that nearly half of retirements might be premature exits prompted by unfavorable work conditions.

“Nurses are not principally leaving for personal reasons, like going back to school or because they lack resilience. They are working in chronically poorly staffed conditions which is an ongoing problem that predates the pandemic,” the researchers explain.

The researchers suggest that healthcare employers could retain more nurses by implementing solutions that improve work-life balance. This might involve offering greater flexibility in work hours, such as shorter shifts, providing higher pay differentials for weekend or holiday shifts, and offering on-site dependent care facilities.

“Nurses are retiring early and leaving employment in the health care sector because of longstanding failures of their employers to improve working conditions that are bad for nurses and unsafe for patients. Until hospitals meaningfully improve the issues driving nurses to leave, everyone loses,” they conclude.