Improving worker retention in the health industry - lessons for management in retaining nurses

This paper used a wellbeing model to explore the factors affecting private sector nurses’ level of job satisfaction and affective commitment using focus group discussions and found that ‘interpersonal relationships’ (colleagues, team, staff, patients), ‘management’ (flexible roster, work environment and support), and the ‘nature of work’ (meaning of work and autonomy), were important for enhancing satisfaction and commitment. Secondly, the paper examines the factors affecting private sector nurses’ intention to remain in nursing in the next five to ten years and found that ‘management, ‘workload’ and ‘pay’ were the main factors influencing their intentions. The implications of these findings for management is that it seems likely that improvement of these factors would have a positive impact on the nurses’ level of job satisfaction, affective commitment as well as their intention to continue working. In particular, these findings suggest that management needs to consider the present skill mix, the level of experience within the skill mix, flexible shifts/hours, better management support, more education, opportunities for career advancement and better communication in order to address the present nurse shortage.