title: 'Stickiness' and 'inflow' as proxy measures of the relative attractiveness of various sub-sectors of nursing employment.
abstract: Workplaces vary in their ability to recruit and retain workers. We introduce two new concepts which can be used as proxy measures of the relative attractiveness of a particular setting, where setting can be defined narrowly (e.g., a particular organization) or broadly (e.g., a sub-sector). "Stickiness" is defined as the transition probability that an employee stays in a given setting; "inflow" as the proportion of new employees. Using a longitudinal dataset of all nurses registered with the College of Nurses of Ontario, Canada 1993-2003, employment site was used to define consistent sectors and sub-sectors. Each nurse was assigned to one sector/sub-sector per year. Stickiness and inflow values were calculated for each sub-sector, and the trends across time were analyzed. Results show that despite shrinkage in the hospital sub-sectors, hospitals remained highly sticky. The expanding sub-sectors, in general, appear relatively unattractive to nurses; they couple medium/low stickiness with high inflow. Considerable variability across sub-sectors was evident. Stickiness and inflow were found to be useful as proxy measures of the relative attractiveness of the various sub-sectors of nursing employment over time. The concepts may be used for other workforces for which linked longitudinal data are available.
authors.affiliation: Postgraduate Medical Education Office, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ont., Canada. m.alameddine@utoronto.ca
authors.forename: Mohamad
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Alameddine
authors.forename: Audrey
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Laporte
authors.forename: Andrea
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Baumann
authors.forename: Linda
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: O'Brien-Pallas
authors.forename: Barbara
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Mildon
authors.forename: Raisa
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Deber
mesh_terms: D004651:Employment / Q000639:trends*; D006801:Humans; D008137:Longitudinal Studies; D009726:Nurses; D009864:Ontario; D010558:Personnel Loyalty; D010560:Personnel Selection