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

NURSES’ RETENTION AND HOSPITAL CHARACTERISTICS IN NEW SOUTH WALES

2. AUSTRALIAN NURSING DATA

The estimation of labour supply models for particular occupations is problematic because the typical
data source (representative household surveys) does not yield large enough samples.

In this paper, we rely on administrative data provided by the NSW Nursing Registration Board (NRB).
All nurses working in NSW, both registered and enrolled, must register with the NRB annually. At
renewal, nurses are given a labour force questionnaire to complete and return. This information
forms the basis of the annual report, Profile of the Nursing Workforce, published by the NSW Health
Department. It has been made available to us in a de-identified form by NSW Health and The
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.⁴

It is estimated that in 1996 (our sample year) the response rate for the labour force questionnaire
was over 90%.⁵ Hence the NRB data set is close to a census of all nurses working in NSW. The NRB
data offer several advantages including a very large sample of nurses and detailed information on job
characteristics. However as with most administrative data, these do not allow us to follow individuals
who leave the administrative rolls; i.e. we have very little information on nurses who do not work in
nursing.⁶ We can look at job and personal characteristics before the observed quitting behaviour but
we cannot look at the factors which attracted the quitters to different occupations. Also we cannot
address the issue of entry into the nursing profession.

The NRB data include information on personal characteristics: sex, age, country of birth and
citizenship, year first registered as a nurse and post basic qualifications. Unfortunately, there is no
information at the household level. Variables such as the number and age of children and the
presence of a partner are not available. In contrast, there is detailed information on job
characteristics: hours of work, location (postcodes), field of specialization, job classification, activity
performed, and type of premise. The postcode information is used to associate regional
unemployment rates with the location of the job. The unemployment rates are included to capture
variations in local labour markets within NSW.

For each nurse working in a public hospital, the postcode of the job location is used to identify the
public hospital in which the nurse is employed and to link a nurse’s labour market choice with the
characteristics of the hospital. These characteristics are taken from the NSW Public Hospitals
Comparison Data Book. The data presented in this publication are provided by the Area Health
Services for each of its public hospitals. Data sources include un-audited annual reports, hospital
cost data collection and the Department of Health reporting System. For more details see New
South Wales Health, 1998. These reports are available on an annual basis until 1998/99. Since the
NRB data for 1998 is not available, the most recent year with available data from the NRB and the
public hospitals is 1996/97.

4 The data consist of an eight year panel in which nurses are linked by a unique registration number. The period
covered by the data spans the years 1993-2001 with missing information for 1998. See Doiron and Jones (2003b) for
more details.

5 More specifically, this response rate applies to all nurses renewing their registration with NSW Health. For the
purposes of the NSW Health Profiles new registrants are not regarded as part of the workforce and they are not
meant to receive or complete the questionnaire. However there is evidence the data includes some new registrants
as well as renewals. We have no way of extracting these samples and this study includes any nurse completing a
questionnaire. There are also other classes of nurses which may not be included in our data set but may form part
of the published figures such as late registrants. For this reason the workforce numbers reported in this paper may
differ slightly from the official estimates of the nursing workforce contained in the Profiles.

6 The NRB data includes nurses who register but do not work in nursing. However since the inclusion of this
information varies by year and is not well understood, the information is difficult to interpret and is not used in
this study.

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