Issue Description: Nurse Turnover

Issue Description: Nurse Turnover
Leadership and management play an instrumental role in the effectiveness of the healthcare system. As such, it is essential to understand effective nursing leadership and management approaches that can be adopted to enhance nursing. This paper investigates how nurse leadership and management can address nurse turnover and improve safe and quality care delivery.
Nurse turnover can be described as the voluntary or involuntary movement of nurses from their place of work or profession. It occurs when nurses leave a healthcare organization for another or change their profession. According to Dyess et al. (2016), approximately 31% of new nurse graduates leave their first employers within the first two years of employment. This turnover rate indicates that organizations must implement strategies to facilitate nurse retention. An understanding of the perceived causes of nurse turnover is necessary. According to Gunawan et al. (2018), nurses leave their workplaces or the profession because of work-related stress, burnout, intrapersonal distress, and job dissatisfaction, among other reasons. As such, these issues need to be addressed to increase nurse retention and reduce nursing turnover rates.
Dyess et al. (2016) indicate that nurse turnover is currently one of the major concerns in healthcare. High nurse turnover contributes to the nursing shortage and the related pressure on the healthcare system. Saleh et al. (2018) suggest that poor nurse retention negatively affects the quality and safety of care. When nurses leave their job or the profession, they leave a void that creates insufficient staffing. As a result, the available nurses have to take on more workload. They have to deal with a high patient ratio (Saleh et al., 2018), affecting their ability to deliver high care standards. They are also hindered from effectively meeting the needs of their patients.
Professional Standards of Practice in Addressing the Issue
Professional standards of practice are instrumental in nursing because they describe the level of competency required for nurses, regardless of the situation. Nurses must be thorough at every stage of the nursing process to ensure that patients receive quality and safe care. Professional standards of practice can play an instrumental role in ensuring that nurses maintain professional conduct even when dealing with the repercussions of nurse turnover. According to Dyess et al. (2016), nurses must meet professional and performance standards when practicing in a challenging work environment. This commitment of nurses to professional standards of practice can ensure that even when they are contemplating leaving the profession or an organization, they operate within the confines of the required standards of practice.
As the American Nurses Association (ANA) (2015) reveals, implementing the nursing standards is necessary for promoting the quality of care delivered to patients. Professional standards ensure that nurses maintain professional conduct by adhering to their ethical commitments. Further, practice standards are a reflection of nursing’s responsibility to society (ANA, 2015). Nurses are responsible for providing quality and safe care to patients, communities, and populati...