As more than one-quarter of all new nurse graduates leave their first job out of school within two years, a new study finds that dissatisfaction with “a variety of unexpected situations” they find in the workplace may be causing the rapid turnover.
Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the study found that nurses were dissatisfied because of relentless pressure to perform their jobs faster—jobs whose tasks often did not reflect what they had learned in nursing school. The study was based on a survey of 612 new nurses in 34 states and was published in the July/August issue of the journal
Nursing Outlook.
The study's principal investigator, New York University College of Nursing professor Christine Kovner, said in a news release that the financial cost of implementing survey respondents' suggestions for nurse-patient ratios and smaller unit sizes could be offset by the decreases in the costs associated with nurse turnover and increases in patient safety.
Respondents also suggested that nursing schools could better prepare students for work by including eight-hour days in clinical training for student nurses along with programs to teach nurses how to communicate effectively with physicians and to make proper chart notations.
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