Nurse Turnover and the Effective Approaches of Nursing Leaders and Managers

Effective Approaches in Leadership and Management
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Effective Approaches in Leadership and Management
In healthcare, nursing leaders and managers tend to face multiple issues in the nursing practice, all of which have to be addressed. The approaches taken to address the issues differ across organizations or individuals. However, it is important to emphasize that the primary role of nursing leaders and managers is to ensure that the healthcare organization runs smoothly regardless of what issues the organization faces. This essay will discuss one of the major problems facing the organization: nursing turnover. A brief description of the issue is presented, followed by the application of professional standards, an explanation of the roles of nursing leaders and managers, ensuring professionalism, and a recommendation of the most appropriate leadership style.
Nursing Turnover
Nursing turnover is one of the greatest challenges facing the healthcare system in the United States and across the world. The term ‘turnover’ as used in nursing implies when a nurse decides to leave an organization due to retirement or other reasons. Due to the stressful nature of the occupation, it can be argued that turnover is also caused by burnout as nurses undertake to find less stressful jobs or leave simply because they can no longer handle their jobs. Empirical evidence linking nursing burnout to turnover has been presented by Kelly et al. (2021), who establish that burnout contributed to an estimated 12% of the turnover cases. Other causes of turnover have also been studied where the consensus among observers and practitioners is that healthcare organizations struggle to manage the problem.
To understand the extent of the problem, some turnover statistics and the challenges caused by the problem can be examined. Estimates presented by Vaughn (2020) indicate that the current nursing turnover rate is between 8.8% and 37%, which depends on the nursing specialty and nursing. For example, the national average turnover for registered nurses is 17% a year. The registered nurse is one of the fastest-growing occupations in the industry with the projected growth rate being 15% by 2026. Despite the demand continuously rising, this specialty has not been exempted from the challenge of rising turnover across the country. Nursing turnover can be costly to the organizations, which explains why solutions are needed. For instance, a bedside registered nurse turnover is estimated at $40,038 and rages between $28400 and $51700. This causes the hospitals to lose between $3.6 million to $6.5 million annually (Plescia, 2021). Therefore, nursing turnover should be a top priority for policy-makers.
Besides the costs to organizations, turnover is also detrimental to patient care quality and safety. According to Dewanto and Wardhani (2018), turnover tends to disturb the well-being of the nurses, which directly affects the quality of care. Additionally, turnover causes the workload per nurse to increase, which means a skewed nurse-to-patient ratio. The result is poor safety due to the possibility of errors and less time spent on a single patient. Turnover can devastate patient outcomes, espe...