Unpleasant working conditions are a top reason nurses walk away from their jobs at long-term care facilities and hospitals, and bid adieu to healthcare, according to a new report.
The study, published Tuesday in JAMA Network Open, sought to define why nurses aren’t just leaving their jobs, but are walking away from the healthcare industry completely.
Researchers looked at nurses in long-term care communities, ambulatory care and hospitals, the study showed. The team surveyed 7,887 nurses from Illinois and New York who walked away from healthcare employment between 2018 and 2021.
Planned retirement was the top reason nurses left healthcare. But right behind that — as the second-leading cause for leaving the field — were reasons related to working conditions. Challenges such as burnout, staffing problems and poor work-life balance were top contenders.
And that showed in the statistics. Among retired nurses who participated in the study, 59% said they had planned their retirements. This indicates that the other reasons for leaving the industry may not be planned.
“Nurses are not principally leaving for personal reasons, like going back to school or because they lack resilience,” Karen Lasater, PhD, RN, an assistant professor at the Leonard Davis Institute for Health Economics and senior author, said in a statement. “They are working in chronically poorly staffed conditions which is an ongoing problem that predates the pandemic.”
To combat the exodus from the field, employers need to provide solutions to improve working conditions including work-life balance. That may look like shorter shifts, higher pay for weekend and holiday work, and on-site childcare.
“Nurses are retiring early and leaving employment in the healthcare sector because of longstanding failures of their employers to improve working conditions that are bad for nurses and unsafe for patients,” said K. Jane Muir, PhD, RN, lead author and a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. “Until hospitals meaningfully improve the issues driving nurses to leave, everyone loses.”
