Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

An aging population typically increases the need for nurses; however, nurses are also aging as 40% of today's nurses are retiring over the next fifteen years. These trends may result in a nursing shortage that negatively impacts the quality of health care services. To ensure the supply of nurses, there is a need to identify and address factors that impact nurses' decision to work. However, studies that relate health as well as job characteristics to the retirement timing of nurses are limited in the literature. This study aims to establish the impact of health on the decision of nurses to retire. I also aim to identify the impact of job characteristics on retirement timing. My sample consists of nurses at least 50 years old and engaged with the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics. Since health impacts the decision to work and work impacts health, I will use a two-stage residual inclusion model. The first stage is an ordered probit regression (a statistical analysis) that identifies factors that are related to self-assessed health. I will then take the residuals (the difference between the estimated value and observed data) from the first stage and use it as an explanatory variable in the second stage - a mixed logit regression, which is another type of statistical analysis. The second stage looks into the factors that determine labour force participation (working fulltime, part-time or retired), including health status and job characteristics as dependent variables. Preliminary findings show that health plays an important role in retirement timing of nurses - the worse the health status is, the more likely he/she to retire. As for job characteristics, sector of employment (hospital, community, long-term care and non-health sector), unionization and having employer-based pension affect the decision to retire while shift type (regular days, nights or irregular) does not. The study's findings can inform programs and policies aimed at retaining late career nurses.