Non-monetary interventions, workforce retention and hospital quality : evidence from the English NHS

Excessive turnover can signicantly impair an organization's performance. Using high-quality administrative data and staggered dierence-in-dierences strategies, we evaluate the impact of a programme that encouraged public hospitals to increase staff retention by providing data and guidelines on how to improve the non-pecuniary aspects of nursing jobs. We find that the programme has decreased the nurse turnover rate by 4.49%, decreased exits from the public hospital sector by 5.38%, and reduced mortality within 30 days from hospital admission by 3.45%, preventing 11,400 deaths. Our results are consistent with a theoretical model in which information is provided to managers of multi-unit organizations, who trade off coordinating decisions across units and adapting them to local conditions.