| Exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. has been enduring a critical shortage
of nurses. The scarcity of nurses has led healthcare facilities to hire additional temporary contract
staff, such as travel nurses. Given that travel nurses have experience working across various
healthcare systems, they carry a valuable perspective on nurse retention. This study aims to
explore what factors influenced travel nurses to leave their previous staff position and use their
unique perspective to identify what hospitals can do to retain nurses. To accomplish this
objective, both quantitative data (descriptive statistics, correlation matrices, and linear
regression) and qualitative data (thematic analysis) were analyzed. The findings unveiled the
main push factors of permanent staff nursing, pull factors of travel nursing, and
recommendations for hospitals to enhance nurse retention. An overarching goal was to learn how
to retain staff through the lens of travel nurses.
Key words: Travel Nurse, Nurse Turnover, Nurse Retention |