Keeping good employees in healthcare is getting harder every year. Hospitals, clinics, and medical departments are losing experienced workers faster than they can replace them.
This puts more pressure on the staff who stay and can affect patient care.
When a skilled nurse or doctor leaves, it doesn’t just leave a gap in the team, it also costs a lot of money. That’s why holding on to great workers is one of the best ways to protect both patient safety and your budget.
If you run a hospital or biomedical department, hanging on to the people you already have is the single-most effective way to protect patient safety and your budget.
Every time an experienced clinician walks out, you lose an estimated $56,300, and the average hospital bleeds up to $5.8 million a year on nurse turnover alone.
The problem isn’t tapering off. Even after a modest improvement, the 2025 NSI report still puts overall hospital turnover at 18.3%, or roughly one in every five employees.
Against that backdrop, retention strategies are no longer a “nice to have.”
Retaining skilled healthcare employees is critical for patient safety, care quality, financial stability, and preserving institutional knowledge. Tackling burnout and staffing shortages is key to fostering a supportive work environment that promotes long-term commitment among professionals.
In this article, we’ll talk about why so many healthcare workers are leaving, what challenges hospitals face, how healthcare can improve employee engagement, and what long-term steps you can take to keep your best people on board.
What Is Retention in the Healthcare Workforce?
Retention is your ability to keep skilled clinicians, biomedical engineers, and support staff on the team long enough for their expertise to pay off.
You calculate it by dividing the number of employees who remain at the end of a set period by the headcount you had at the start, then multiplying by 100 for a percentage.
A high retention rate means stable teams, preserved institutional knowledge, and steady patient outcomes. A low rate tells you that talent leaves faster than you can recruit, driving up costs and risk.
In short, retention gauges whether your workplace gives people enough purpose, resources, and growth to stay.
If your retention rate is low, it’s a sign that something needs to change. Maybe staff feel tired, unappreciated, or unsure about their future at work.
When good people leave, it takes time and money to train new ones. This can hurt team morale and slow down patient care.
On the other hand, when employees stay, they build stronger relationships with their coworkers and patients. They also become more confident and skilled in their roles. This helps the whole healthcare system run better.
That’s why keeping your team happy and supported is so important.
The Importance of Employee Retention in Healthcare
Keeping your employees isn’t about morale alone, as it directly affects every metric you track. When turnover rises, patient harm climbs with it.
Press Ganey’s 2023 review found that hospitals with high RN churn recorded significantly more patient-fall events. A 100- to 200-bed facility that cuts turnover to the lowest quartile saves about $105,000 a year just on fall-related costs.
Turnover also strains budgets in ways that go far beyond the visible cost of recruitment.
Vacancies push overtime higher, extend reliance on travelers, and slow large projects, everything from capital-equipment rollouts to EMR upgrades, because the experienced hands who know the systems best are no longer there to guide them. Financial leaders often find themselves redirecting funds meant for innovation into stop-gap staffing fixes.
Finally, retention safeguards institutional knowledge. When experienced biomedical engineers stay, you preserve tacit expertise in device maintenance, calibration protocols, and root-cause investigations.
A stable workforce protects your patients, your bottom line, and your capacity to advance care.
Key Challenges to Retention in the Healthcare Sector
Employee loyalty slips for many reasons. Knowing the pressure points lets you act before staff start looking for the exit.
Burnout and Mental Health
Relentless workloads and emotional strain carve away at morale faster than any pay raise can repair.
When you run short-staffed, shifts stretch, documentation piles up, and traumatic events stack one after another with no time to process them. Fatigue soon blurs judgment, which raises patient-safety risks and fuels even sharper stress cycles.
Clinicians who once thrived on helping others begin to numb out or detach, and the first step toward resigning is often a request for extended leave.
Supporting mental health through counseling access, debrief sessions, and predictable shift lengths breaks this spiral and tells your team their wellbeing matters as much as their output.
Staffing Shortages
When vacancies outnumber CVs, you enter a costly loop: fewer hands make each shift tougher, which pushes more people out the door.
Many hospitals now tap reliable medical engineering recruitment agencies to find biomedical technicians and clinical engineers on short notice, preserving device uptime and patient flow while permanent hiring catches up.
Quick access to specialized talent plugs immediate gaps, but you still need a long-range plan to reduce dependence on emergency fixes. Otherwise, the shortage simply re-emerges a few months later under a heavier price tag.
Work-Life Balance
Your staff cannot pour from an empty cup. Split nights, unpredictable call rotations, and weekend double shifts make family plans impossible, eroding commitment no matter how passionate someone feels about patient care.
You gain more loyalty by building schedules around human limits by capping consecutive shifts, spreading holiday duties fairly, and offering partial remote work for non-clinical roles such as coding or telehealth triage.
Stability lets employees rest, pursue hobbies, and return ready to focus. In turn, you see fewer absences, fewer errors, and longer tenure.
Compensation and Benefits
Pay on its own will not solve burnout, but lagging wages push people to agencies or rival systems that value their skills.
Benchmark each role against regional and national data, then adjust base rates, differentials, and bonus structures to stay competitive. Pair that with benefits staff actually use, such as affordable dependent coverage, retirement matching above the industry norm, tuition support, and commuter stipends.
These steps not only help reduce turnover but also improve employee motivation by showing staff that their work and well-being truly matter.
Transparent pay bands and frequent reviews show employees you reward contribution in real time, not just when someone threatens to leave.
Lack of Growth Opportunities
Healthcare professionals expect to keep learning.
Map clear skill ladders by charging nurse tracks, imaging-specialist certifications, biomedical-engineer project leads, and funding the coursework or conference travel needed to reach each rung. Encourage job shadowing across departments so team members can pivot without quitting the organization.
Growth transforms a static position into a dynamic career, anchoring employees who might otherwise look elsewhere for challenge and recognition.
Toxic Workplace Culture
Bullying, cliques, or blame-first attitudes drive turnover faster than any external recruiter.
You set the tone by enforcing zero-tolerance policies, training managers in conflict resolution, and modeling respectful communication. Regular pulse surveys and anonymous reporting make it safe to surface issues early.
A culture that values psychological safety frees staff to speak up about errors, share ideas, and collaborate, conditions that boost both retention and patient outcomes.
Poor Leadership Management
Leaders who micromanage, ignore feedback, or hide information erode trust. Invest in leadership development that covers emotional intelligence, transparent decision-making, and fair workload distribution.
Pair new supervisors with seasoned mentors and hold them accountable for team engagement scores alongside operational targets. When staff view leaders as advocates rather than obstacles, they stay through challenges that would otherwise trigger resignations.
Good leaders make a big difference in whether people stay or leave. When staff feel supported and heard, they are more likely to enjoy their work. Leaders should check in with their teams often, listen with care, and fix problems quickly.
Training new managers is also important. Give them the tools they need to lead with respect and fairness. Celebrate small wins and share team success.
When leaders show that they care, trust grows, and people are more willing to stay, even during hard times.
Lack of Recognition or Appreciation
In an environment where mistakes carry life-or-death stakes, praise can feel rare. Yet genuine recognition, like public shout-outs, handwritten notes, or peer-nominated awards, reinforces purpose and belonging.
Tie acknowledgment awards to specific behaviors, such as reducing device downtime or mentoring new hires, so recognition feels earned and replicable. Small but sincere gestures cost little yet build loyalty that salary bumps alone cannot buy.
People want to know that their hard work matters. A simple “thank you” can go a long way, especially in high-stress jobs like healthcare. When staff feel seen and valued, they are more likely to stay and do their best work.
Make it a habit to recognize good work often. This can be done in meetings, emails, or even during daily rounds. Encourage team members to lift each other up, too.
When appreciation becomes part of the culture, it boosts morale and helps create a strong, connected team.
Sustainable Healthcare Workforce Strategies to Improve Retention
You’ll need more than quick fixes to retain staff. The practices below give your employees concrete reasons to stay while keeping patient care steady.
Offer Competitive Compensation Packages
You don’t have to outbid every rival, but you do need transparent, market-matched scales that adjust when the labor market shifts.
Annual compensation reviews, specialty differentials for hard-to-fill roles, and loan-repayment assistance speak to both early-career clinicians and seasoned biomedical engineers.
When employees see fair pay aligned with their skills, they stop shopping for offers and start planning long-term projects with you.
Suggest Flexible Working Hours
Rigid rosters push good clinicians toward agencies that let them choose their shifts.
Offer self-scheduling or compressed workweeks so staff can balance night duty with family life or study time. In fact, a 2023 survey of 500 nurses linked self-scheduling to higher engagement and lower intent to quit.
Options worth piloting:
- Self-schedules that open several weeks in advance.
- Split shifts for imaging techs who can cover peak demand twice in one day.
- Hybrid days for educators and telehealth triage nurses who can work partly from home.
Establish Performance Evaluation Systems
Clear, two-way reviews replace guesswork with measurable goals. Use structured rubrics so expectations match role scope, then tie feedback to individualized development plans.
Consistent evaluations boost engagement because staff see how daily tasks connect to broader objectives, not just incident reports.
Strengthen Leadership and Organizational Culture
Front-line teams stay when they trust their managers. Leadership training that covers coaching skills, transparent decision-making, and conflict resolution lowers attrition.
Reinforce a speak-up culture with unit huddles and anonymous reporting so issues surface early instead of driving silent exits.
Invest in Professional Growth
Career momentum is a powerful retention magnet.
- Fund certifications and advanced degrees, for instance, CBET prep for biomedical techs or CCRN courses for critical-care nurses.
- Create project-lead tracks so experienced staff can guide equipment installations or quality-improvement pilots without leaving clinical practice.
- Support conference travel to keep skills current and spark new research ideas.
Focus on Great Onboarding
First impressions last. Pair new hires with trained preceptors for at least 90 days, schedule regular check-ins, and stagger classroom sessions so information lands when it’s immediately useful.
Hospitals that built structured onboarding tracks cut nurse turnover by double-digit margins in the first year.
Offer Paid Time Off and Mental Health Days
Rest is preventive medicine for burnout. Bundle PTO with a small bank of employer-designated mental-health days that staff can take without paperwork.
In the APA’s 2023 Work in America survey, workers with easy access to mental-health leave reported higher commitment and lower turnover intent.
Together, these practices give clinicians and engineers the stability, support, and growth they need to keep building their careers and their service lines where they are.
Case Studies on Retaining Healthcare Talent
Numbers alone can’t show you how retention programs play out day-to-day, while real-world examples can reveal ideas that survive busy wards, budget cycles, and accreditation visits.
The two brief profiles below come from large U.S. systems with very different footprints, yet each cut turnover by pairing practical support with clear career pathways.
Their results suggest that even modest, well-targeted initiatives can hold people in place long enough for deeper culture shifts to take root.
Cleveland Clinic
If you follow the Cleveland Clinic’s playbook, you start by treating retention as caregiver safety.
The system backs that stance with hard support: a Caregiver Hardship Fund that distributed $530,000 to more than 1,100 staff in 2023, plus “Lead Forward” programs that groom future leaders at every level.
Those efforts paid off with the enterprise turnover dropping to 14.2% in 2024.
By pairing financial relief with clear advancement paths, the clinic shows that practical help and career momentum can keep a sprawling workforce engaged.
Intermountain Health
Saint Joseph Hospital, part of Intermountain Health, rebuilt its mentorship model after COVID-19 left too many novices without guidance. Instead of one-to-one pairings, the team launched group and peer mentoring cohorts run by professional-development nurses.
Within a year, retention among new and early-career RNs climbed to 97%, and plans are in motion to spread the format across more units.
The lesson: structured peer networks give newcomers a safe space to swap questions, share stress, and see a future inside the organization.
Conclusion
Retention improves when you combine tangible support, growth pathways, and community.
Whether you build a hardship fund, set up group mentoring, or both, the goal is the same: give clinicians and engineers enough stability and purpose to picture their next five years with you and help them get there.
David Gevorkian founded Be Accessible driven by his unwavering passion for website accessibility and ADA compliance. Throughout his career, he has worked with financial institutions, crafting both websites and mobile applications. David holds a Master’s in Business Administration from Salve Regina University in Rhode Island. As a dedicated advocate, he is committed to creating web interfaces that are accessible to everyone. Outside of his professional endeavors, David enjoys recording music and playing soccer with friends.