‘Stickiness’ and ‘inflow’ as proxy measures of the relative attractiveness of various sub-sectors of nursing employment

Workplaces vary in their ability to recruit and retain workers. We introduce two new concepts which can be used as proxy measures of the relative attractiveness of a particular setting, where setting can be defined narrowly (e.g., a particular organization) or broadly (e.g., a sub-sector). “Stickiness” is defined as the transition probability that an employee stays in a given setting; “inflow” as the proportion of new employees. Using a longitudinal dataset of all nurses registered with the College of Nurses of Ontario, Canada 1993–2003, employment site was used to define consistent sectors and sub-sectors. Each nurse was assigned to one sector/sub-sector per year. Stickiness and inflow values were calculated for each sub-sector, and the trends across time were analyzed. Results show that despite shrinkage in the hospital sub-sectors, hospitals remained highly sticky. The expanding sub-sectors, in general, appear relatively unattractive to nurses; they couple medium/low stickiness with high inflow. Considerable variability across sub-sectors was evident. Stickiness and inflow were found to be useful as proxy measures of the relative attractiveness of the various sub-sectors of nursing employment over time. The concepts may be used for other workforces for which linked longitudinal data are available.