NR 395 Week 6 New Nurse Turnover Trend Analysis Example

Trend Analysis: The Nurses With the Least Experience Are the Ones Most Likely to Leave, and What That Does to a Medical-Surgical Unit

Student Name

College of Nursing, Chamberlain University

NR 395: Ethics, Integrity, and Professional Nursing Trends

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Trend Analysis: The Nurses With the Least Experience Are the Ones Most Likely to Leave, and What That Does to a Medical-Surgical Unit

A Trend Narrow Enough to Prove

The trend this paper examines is not "the nursing shortage," which is too large to argue about in a short paper, but a narrower one: the concentration of burnout and departure among nurses in their first decade of practice, and its effect on the units where most new graduates start, adult medical-surgical floors. The claim is that this trend is real, that it is changing how those units work in ways that are not always visible in staffing numbers, and that the costs fall on people who did not create it.

The trend matters to me directly. I will graduate into it. The nurses who precept me will increasingly be only a year or two ahead of me, and the question of whether I stay past my first year will be shaped by what this paper describes.

Evidence That It Is Real

The first piece of evidence predates the pandemic. Kovner et al. (2014), following a national panel of new nurses over ten years, reported that about 17.5% left their first job within one year of starting. That figure established that early departure was already common before 2020.

The second piece shows how the pandemic intensified it. Martin et al. (2023), analyzing the 2022 National Nursing Workforce Survey data from 29,472 registered nurses and 24,061 licensed practical and vocational nurses across 45 states, found that 62% reported an increased workload during the pandemic, and that about half reported feeling emotionally drained (50.8%) or used up (56.4%) a few times a week or every day. These problems were most pronounced among nurses with ten or fewer years of experience, and the authors link them to an overall 3.3% decline in the U.S. nursing workforce over two years.

Those two findings, one from a long-running panel and one from a national survey by the body that licenses nurses, point the same way. The trend is not an impression from social media; it is measured, and it is concentrated in the group that staffs the units where new graduates begin.

Who Gains and Who Pays

Some people gain. Nurses who leave the bedside for outpatient, remote or travel roles often gain better hours, higher pay or less physical strain, and for many of them leaving is the right decision. Hospitals that fill the gaps with travel contracts gain short-term coverage.

Others pay. Patients on medical-surgical units pay through continuity: when a unit's staff turns over quickly, fewer nurses know the patients, the physicians, the unit's routines or the quirks of its equipment. The nurses who stay pay too. On many units, a nurse with two years of experience is now precepting a new graduate, serving as charge nurse on nights, and orienting travel nurses, roles that used to belong to nurses with ten or more years. The new graduates pay by receiving shorter or thinner orientations from preceptors who are themselves still learning, which is part of what makes them likely to leave in turn. The cost that is hardest to see is the loss of experienced judgment: the nurse who can tell from across the room that a patient is not right is increasingly absent.

What It Looks Like on One Shift

During one of my clinical rotations, on a thirty-bed adult floor, the night I observed had six registered nurses. Two were travel nurses on 13-week contracts. Two had graduated within the past 18 months. The charge nurse had three years of experience and was also precepting a new graduate on her first week of nights. The most experienced nurse on the floor had seven years. When a patient's blood pressure dropped at 0300, the new graduate caring for him went to find the charge nurse, who was helping a travel nurse locate supplies on an unfamiliar unit, and then to the seven-year nurse, who was admitting a patient from the emergency department.

Nothing went wrong that night; the patient was seen within minutes and recovered. But the shift made the trend visible in a way the survey numbers do not. The experience on the unit was spread so thinly that every question traveled to the same two people, and those two people were doing their own work at the same time. That is the working condition the survey describes as a heavy workload, and it is the one in which a new graduate decides, often within the first year, whether to stay.

Objections From Inside the Profession

Some nurses would argue that this is not a trend worth worrying about. Early-career turnover has always been high, they would say, and young nurses moving between jobs is how they find where they belong; it is not a crisis but a normal career path. Others would argue that the pandemic was a single shock and that the numbers will return to their earlier levels as workloads ease.

The first objection has some force: movement between jobs is not always loss, and some turnover is healthy. But the Kovner figure described departures from a first job, not from the profession, and the Martin findings describe burnout, not career exploration. The second objection may prove partly right, but it assumes that the conditions producing burnout were temporary. Staffing ratios, workload and the thinning of experienced preceptors have not obviously reverted, and the new graduates entering now are being oriented by the smaller, younger group that stayed.

A Judgment With a Date on It

My judgment is that this trend will continue on medical-surgical units for at least the next three years unless hospitals change how they support nurses in their first two years, and that the most useful single change is protecting the experienced nurses who remain from being spread across every teaching and leadership role at once. A testable version of that claim: by 2029, units that give their preceptors reduced patient loads while precepting will show lower first-year turnover than units that do not.

The ethical point underneath the trend is that the fifth provision of the nursing code names duties a nurse owes to self, including the expectation of a safe place to work that allows nurses to flourish (American Nurses Association [ANA], 2025). A system in which the least experienced nurses are the most burned out is not meeting that expectation, and the cost is paid by patients as well as nurses.

References

American Nurses Association. (2025). Code of ethics for nurses. https://codeofethics.ana.org/

Kovner, C. T., Brewer, C. S., Fatehi, F., & Jun, J. (2014). What does nurse turnover rate mean and what is the rate? Policy, Politics, & Nursing Practice, 15(3-4), 64-71. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527154414547953

Martin, B., Kaminski-Ozturk, N., O'Hara, C., & Smiley, R. (2023). Examining the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on burnout and stress among U.S. nurses. Journal of Nursing Regulation, 14(1), 4-12. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2155-8256(23)00063-7