How hospitals can reverse nursing workforce losses
New research from Penn Nursing finds that most registered nurses who recently left hospital employment are motivated to return to health care work, and safe nurse staffing levels is the top factor that would bring them back.
2 min. read
New research from Penn’s School of Nursing suggests most registered nurses who recently left hospital employment are motivated to return to health care work—and safe nurse staffing levels is the top factor that would bring them back, according to new research from the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research (CHOPR).
The study, published in JAMA Network Open, analyzes data from 4,043 actively licensed registered nurses who left direct care hospital positions within the last five years. Among them, 8% were employed outside health care, 36% were unemployed, and 56% were retired.
Most unemployed nurses had searched for health care work within the past year and said they were likely to return to nursing. One-quarter of nurses working outside health care said they had also searched for nursing positions recently.
Adequate staffing emerged as the top factor that nurses said would increase their likelihood of returning to nursing work. “Unsafe staffing drives nurses away from hospital employment—and adequate staffing is the key to bringing them back,” says lead author Karen B. Lasater, the Jessie M. Scott Term Chair in Nursing and Health Policy, associate professor in the Department of Biobehavioral Health Sciences and CHOPR associate director. “The problem and the solution are the same. High nurse turnover is a solvable crisis, because the reasons nurses leave are the same reasons they would return, if addressed.”
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