The NuRS project
Research type
Research Study
Full title
NuRS: Understanding Nurse Retention and its impact on Patient Safety outcomes in secondary care and mental health
IRAS ID
265230
Contact name
Jane Jones
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Birmingham City University
Duration of Study in the UK
2 years, 3 months, 29 days
Research summary
Nurses are leaving the NHS at an increasing rate. This means that in 2017, there were 16,000 fewer nurses than in 2012 if the rate of nurses leaving had remained the same. Consequently, there are 42,000 nurse vacancies. Different nurse professions, specialties and regions experience different rates of nurse retention meaning that some patients suffer compromised care in comparison to others.
The aim of this project is to explore whether these differences in nurse retention can be used to detect underlying factors that contribute to more or less nurses leaving within multiple, large organisational and national datasets. We will also explore what all this means with respect to patient safety and some key patient outcomes.
We will work with up to 20 healthcare providers across England, including 10 secondary care and 10 mental healthcare providers, to explore multiple large datasets. This data will have been routinely collected for other purposes and shared with the research team in a format that does not identify the individuals within it.
This project will be delivered in four stages. The first stage will involve cleaning the data, looking at its quality and linking the different datasets to each other. The second stage will explore patterns and signals in the data to identify the first round of relationships and factors that could contribute to nurse retention. The third stage will look to refine the signals that have been found, by exploring those which are relevant and those which are not and using more complicated machine learning techniques to explore the complex and multiple competing behaviours within the datasets. Finally, stage four will draw together the interpretations of the analyses and work to visualise the findings in a meaningful and impactful way to a wide audience.
REC name
N/A
REC reference
N/A