Adam Smith Business School

Professor Jo Blanden, University of Surrey.

"Do Non-monetary Interventions Improve Staff Retention? Evidence from English NHS Hospitals"
Wednesday, 3 May. 3 pm
Room 709A, Boyd Orr Building.

Abstract

Excessive turnover reduces the stock of an organization’s human capital. In the public sector, where salary increases are often constrained, managers need to leverage on non-monetary working conditions to retain their employees. We investigate whether workers are responsive to improvements in non-wage aspects of their job by evaluating the impact on nurse retention of a programme that encouraged public hospitals to increase staff retention through data monitoring and improving the non-pecuniary aspects of nursing jobs. Employing rich employee-level administrative data from the universe of English NHS hospitals and a staggered difference-in-difference design, we find that the programme has improved nursing retention within hospitals, decreased exits from the public hospital sector, and decreased mortality by preventing 11.400 patient deaths within 30 days from hospital admission. Our results indicate that a light-touch intervention can shift management behaviour and improve hospital workforce turnover. These findings are important in sectors affected by labour supply shortages, and they are especially policy-relevant in the healthcare context, where such shortages have potentially negative effects on patient outcomes.

Bio

Jo Blanden is a Professor of Economics at the University of Surrey and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Performance, LSE. Her research interests are in family, education and labour economics.

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For further information, please contact business-school-research@glasgow.ac.uk

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First published: 20 March 2023