How important is my profession in my life ?

The overall aim of this project is to understand the importance of their profession in the lives of newly graduated nurses through the analysis of their professional values and motivations. This pilot study should lead to a better understanding of the factors that might influence them to leave the profession prematurely and thus provide specific information to help adapt retention policies.

The study is divided into several phases that may be carried out in parallel.

In the first phase, a secondary analysis of the data from the so-called “HEdS-DSAS project” will be carried out. This yet to be published study by the research group (Schneider et al., 2023) asked nurses and other hospital workers about their own thoughts on what can be done to retain more members of the healthcare workforce. For the present pilot study, the analysis will be adapted and segmented by age groups, so as to determine whether an age-related effect is detectable and what its determinants might be. This work will be carried out for the closed and open questions of the online questionnaire as well as for the qualitative interviews which were also carried out on the same topic (thematic analysis).

In parallel, the status of the nursing profession among recent graduates (2020–2023) in terms of their values and motivations will be investigated by means of an online survey and focus groups. A mixed sequential explanatory model will be used (Creswell, 2015). The qualitative data will be used to elaborate and explain the initial quantitative findings.

In addition, a brief survey will be conducted with first year undergraduate students around their motivations for starting to study for a bachelor’s degree in nursing.