| |
|
|
Theme: Health Human Resources
Project: 2-1: Who Works Where and Why? Modeling
the Turnover of Nurses Across Canada.
Project Lead:
Audrey Laporte
Synopsis of Project:
Project 2-1 will examine how individual, job and employer characteristics affect the successful recruitment and retention of nurses across Canada. It combines the concepts and tools of labour economics with those of health services research to better understand the factors that affect 1) nursesŐ propensity to remain in the profession; and 2) their choice of work setting. It will use administrative data from across the country to investigate the relationship between the characteristics of nurses (e.g., age, sex, diploma/degree, RN/RPN/LPN, employed full-time/part-time/casual) and the ability of various sectors (e.g., community, long-term care facilities, acute care hospitals etc.) to retain nurses. The results will inform decision-makers in both government and the private sector across the country as they devise policies to attract nurses to the profession and retain them once employed in the health care system and will provide added information for models designed to forecast the future supply of nurses. This Project will also allow us to distinguish between the contributions of two competing hypotheses about the reason for the higher stickiness of hospital sub-sectors (and the reluctance of nurses to move to the community) which we found in Ontario. If it is due to higher wages/benefits in the hospital sector, then the discrepancy between hospitals and community should be less in those provinces where regional health authorities impose common wage structures than in those where hospitals pay more. Alternatively, if the stickiness is due to inherent differences in the jobs (skills, preferences, working conditions), there should be minimal variation in these patterns across jurisdictions. Distinguishing between these two explanations should have major policy implications for the ability to attract nursing staff.
The primary hypotheses to be investigated are:
- The propensity to remain in the nursing profession, relative to exiting, is positively related to age, level of nursing education, RN status, full-time employment, and years of nursing experience.
- The propensity of a nurse to switch to a new work sub-sector vs. staying in her current sub-sector is negatively related to level of nursing education, RN status, years of nursing experience, age, and full-time employment.
- The ability of sub-sectors to retain nurses ("stickiness") differs significantly across provinces and is higher in provinces with no wage differentials between that sub-sector and the hospital sub-sector.
|
|
