5 Reasons Why Nurses Quit Their Jobs

Nurses leave the bedside for reasons that have less to do with the work itself and more to do with the conditions around it. Here are five of the most common.

1. Short staffing

When a unit runs short, the workload lands on whoever is there. You get asked to extend your shift or pick up straight duties to cover the gap. The extra hours pay, but the physical and mental exhaustion of working that long does not balance out.

"I used to be okay with working straight shifts. Then I noticed I was making more and more mistakes. The stress I could handle, but I wasn't going to risk my patients' safety. I quit," a former ward nurse said.

2. Limited upward mobility

Moving up the hierarchy now takes more than a BSN. Most advancement requires a master's degree or higher. For nurses who have been working for years, that means going back to school, often while supporting a family, and pulling time away from work to do it. For many, the math does not work.

3. Underpayment

Salaries vary by location, but the pattern holds: most nurses are underpaid, and pay tends to cap after a few years.

"Most of our new nurses make about what I make now, which is well above what I started at. It's unfair, but that's how it goes," a veteran ER nurse said.

4. Poor management

Beyond difficult coworkers, nurses deal with management systems that push them past their limits. Tasks outside the scope of nursing get delegated down to cut costs, and nurses absorb the load.

5. Too many unrelated tasks

Carrying several patients at once is the job. Getting handed housekeeping and infection-control duties on top of that is not. The extra assignments pull nurses away from actual patient care and, when they are clearly unrelated, make competent people feel like they are wasting their training.

"When I left, I didn't leave the profession. I left the system. I knew there was somewhere I'd be valued as a nurse," a nurse supervisor said.