Job crafting as retention strategy: An ethnographic account of the challenges faced in crafting new nursing roles in care practice

Felder, Martijn, Kuijper, Syb, Allen, Davina ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6729-7502, Bal, Roland, Wallenburg, Iris and RN2Blend consortium 2024. Job crafting as retention strategy: An ethnographic account of the challenges faced in crafting new nursing roles in care practice. International Journal of Health Planning and Management 39 (3) , pp. 722-739. 10.1002/hpm.3780

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Abstract

Nursing shortages in the global north are soaring. Of particular concern is the high turnover among bachelor‐trained nurses. Nurses tend to leave the profession shortly after graduating, often citing a lack of appreciation and voice in clinical and organisational decision‐making. Healthcare organisations seek to increase the sustainability of the nursing workforce by enhancing nursing roles and nurses' organisational positions. In the Netherlands, hospitals have introduced pilots in which nurses craft new roles. We followed two pilots ethnographically and examined how nurses and managers shaped new nursing roles and made sense of their (expected) impact on workforce resilience. Informed by the literature on professional ecologies and job crafting, we show how managers and nurses defined new roles by differentiating between training levels and the uptake of care‐related organisational responsibilities beyond the traditional nursing role. We also show how, when embedding such new roles, nurses needed to negotiate specific challenges associated with everyday nursing practice, manifested in distinct modes of organising, work rhythms, embodied expertise, socio‐material arrangements, interprofessional relationships, and conventions about what is considered important in nursing. We argue that our in‐depth case study provides a relational and socio‐material understanding of the organisational politics implicated in organising care work in the face of workforce shortages.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Healthcare Sciences
Additional Information:	License information from Publisher: LICENSE 1: URL: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Publisher:	Wiley
ISSN:	0749-6753
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	14 February 2024
Date of Acceptance:	29 January 2024
Last Modified:	10 Jun 2024 11:30
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/166296

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