Economics and Finance Research Talk - 8 November

Speaker: Jo Blanden (University of Surrey)

Topic: Non-monetary interventions, workforce retention and hospital quality: evidence from the English NHS 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 behavior and improve hospital workforce turnover. These findings are important in sectors affected by labor supply shortages, and they are especially policy-relevant in the health care context, where such shortages are acute and have potentially negative effects on patient outcomes.

For more Information:

Wenke.Zhang@brunel.ac.uk; Matteo.Pazzona@brunel.ac.uk