Human resource practices that influence labour turnover of nurses in public and private hospitals. A case of Nairobi

Abstract

This study investigated human resource practices that influence labour turnover of nurses in both private and public hospitals in Kenya. Kenya is losing specially trained nurses. According to the nursing council of Kenya, Kenya has lost over 3000 specially trained nurses to foreign countries during the past five years. Health care systems cannot function without human resources for health.

Nurse migration has led to a loss of scarce human resources and loss of investment in education (Kline, 2003). It has also compromised the quality of health services in public hospitals. International migration threatens global health because the loss of human resources through migration of professional health staff to developed countries usually results in a loss of capacity of health systems in developing countries to deliver health care equitably (leN, 2004).

Nurse migration has challenged policy makers and other experts to address the ethical, financial, social, political and health implications surrounding the issue (Kingma, 2006). A high level of staff turn over will mean that there will be high additional cost of staff replacement and recruitment, additional training costs and disruption to the quality of service or to production (Needham, 2000). The research used descriptive research design.

The study population consisted of nurses working in public and private hospitals in Nairobi. The hospitals were sampled using multistage stage sampling technique. The research used stratified random sampling to get the sample for nurses and simple random sampling to get the sample for the administrators.