Nurses' retention and hospital characteristics in New South Wales, CHERE Discussion Paper No 52

NURSES’ RETENTION AND HOSPITAL CHARACTERISTICS IN NEW SOUTH WALES

Table 5. Marginal effects on the retention probabilities

Notes: Marginal effects are calculated for each observation and averaged over the sample. For discrete variables, the
marginal effect is the shift in probability when placing the person in the group represented by the variable versus the
reference group. For continuous variables, the derivative of the predicted probability is taken. Standard errors are
computed with a bootstrap estimator using 500 replications. A * indicates that the average marginal effect is significant
according to a 95% confidence interval. A ** indicates that the effect is borderline significant at 5% in the sense that
due to the asymmetry in the bootstrap distribution, the statistic alternates between being significant or not at 5%
depending on the method used to compute the 95% confidence interval.

The level of expenditures (at constant staff levels) tends to increase retention. The effect is substantial
with an increase of one hundred thousand dollars in a hospital creating an increase of 18 ppts in the
retention probability of nurses. Note that this could indicate higher nurses’ salaries but since we are
keeping the broad categories of job classification constant, the salary increase cannot be very large. It
could indicate higher non-wage job benefits such as greater spending on staff development. It could
also represent higher salaries of other staff; i.e. it could indicate the presence of senior staff
specialists. (Note that in this experiment we are keeping the staffing levels constant when increasing
expenditures.) More detailed breakdowns of expenditures would be needed to distinguish between
these possible interpretations.

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