Healthcare leaders have become increasingly sophisticated in calculating the cost of nurse turnover. We have formulas to estimate vacancy costs, recruitment expenses, orientation costs, contract labor expenditures, and productivity losses.
Yet, we continue to overlook a larger question: What is the societal cost of losing a nurse from the profession?
When a nurse leaves one employer and joins another, the loss is largely organizational. One organization experiences a loss while another experiences a gain. The nurse remains available to patients, colleagues, and the profession.
However, when a nurse leaves the profession due to burnout, disability, trauma, career change, or death/suicide, the loss extends far beyond a single institution. Society loses years of educational investment, clinical expertise, mentorship capacity, workforce productivity, tax contributions, and future patient care. Despite ongoing concerns about workforce shortages, nursing has lacked an accepted method for estimating those broader societal costs.
Recent work by Omid Razmpour, RN, and colleagues advanced the science of nurse turnover economics through development of the RETAIN Framework, a rigorous methodology for identifying and quantifying turnover costs. The framework provided a foundation for understanding and measuring organizational losses associated with nurse turnover. Those contributions represent an important step forward.
