A data-driven multicriteria decision model for healthcare workforce retention strategies

The retention of nurses and physicians in Hospitals is a global problem affecting the healthcare system worldwide. This study focuses on the healthcare workforce retention problem considering the current situation in Taiwan. Healthcare staff in Taiwan are undergoing a critical phase, with an increasing number of experienced workers leaving their job to go to work for private organizations or as freelancers. We develop a data-driven four-phase methodology based on the design of a satisfaction index that allows to rank different groups of employees against a given set of criteria. First, criteria are identified and clustered to describe different job dimensions (phase 1). Hence, subjective evaluations of the criteria are collected from healthcare workers while experts provide pairwise comparisons among them (phase 2). An adjusted analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is used to weight the job dimensions and the criteria within each job dimension (phase 3). Finally, the satisfaction index is formalized and computed for different groups of employees (phase 4). The methodology has been implemented with data collected from healthcare workers employed in three healthcare institutions in Northern Taiwan. The proposed index represents a novel decision support tool for managers and policy makers in designing intervention strategies able to address different needs of different groups of employees. Besides, it allows for innovative applications to quality management (QM) by extending the standard QM approach to hospitals and healthcare centers far beyond the common focus on patients' satisfaction. Finally, the mathematical formulation of the index is very flexible and allows for applications to any employment sector through a variety of analyses based on different categorizations of the workers.