“If we are serious about nurse retention we must nurture and support our staff”

Jane Wray, Helen Gibson
David Barrett, Analisa Smyth
and Rosie Stenhouse

At this year’s Royal College At this year’s Royal College of Nursing (RCN) International Nursing Conference and Exhibition 2019 (Sheffield Hallam University, 3-5 September), the STaR project team were delighted to share our preliminary findings with an international audience of nursing academics, practitioners and researchers.

Jane Wray hosted a symposium of four papers on “Retention of newly qualified nurses (NQNs) in the UK National Health Service (NHS) on the 2^nd day of the conference. David Barrett presented the findings from the STaR project Rapid Evidence Review, and this was followed by Jane and Helen Gibson (STaR project post-doctoral researcher) on the interview data “Perspectives on support during the transition from student to NQN: Views of students, NQNs, academics and clinical managers”. The third paper was by Dr Rosie Stenhouse (The University of Edinburgh) on “Job Embeddedness: Towards a Theory of Retention in Newly Qualified Nurses/Midwives” and she presented findings from interviews with 23 early career nurses about their experience of the workplace. This work is part of a larger longitudinal study exploring engagement levels, emotional intelligence, resilience and burnout yearly, retention, academic grade and following qualification, pay.  The final one was by Analisa Smythe (Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust) on “A qualitative study of experiences of online peer support for NQNs” – a project also funded by the Burdett Trust for Nursing that used focus groups with NQNs to refine an online peer support intervention.

There was lots of interesting comments and questions and it was great to hear from recently qualified nurses in the audience whose experiences appear to be very similar to the ones we reported - further validating our findings. The wider discussion at the end of the symposium focused on workforce and retention and the key message was that if organisations want to attract and retain staff they need to ensure that all staff (not just NQNs) are given the ‘the right support, at the right time and in the right place’ and that ‘if we are serious about nurse retention we must nurture and support our staff’.

Throughout the conference workforce issues including safe staffing, staff shortages and retention were repeatedly referred to. We also attended a symposium led by Judy Brook (City University) on “Development and implementation of an intervention to increase retention and decrease burnout of early career nurses” – another project supported by the Burdett Trust for Nursing.  It was interesting to see how coproduction is being used to develop an intervention to support transition. This team have published a systematic review related to their project and you can find out further information about their work by contacting JudyBrook.