Nursing turnover should measure cost of leaving the profession, say researchers

While researchers’ measure nursing turnover’s organizational cost, the profession lacks a method to estimate the cost of nurses quitting the profession, say researchers Judy Davidson, DNP, RN, and Robert Longyear, BS. They contend society loses years of educational investment, clinical expertise, mentorship capacity, workforce productivity, tax contributions and future patient care when burnout, disability, trauma, death or career change cause nurses to leave the profession. Without accurate estimates of nursing turnover’s societal cost, they say policies for nurse well-being programs, workforce retention programs and suicide prevention efforts may struggle to receive limited government funding. Consequently, they developed a method to measure the societal costs and published results in Nursing Outlook’s July-August issue. (MedPage Today opinion article, 6/20/26)