The short version: Pay improvements since 2023 have reduced some pressure, but nurses still leave primarily because of workload, management culture, and limited career development. Operators who address those three things will retain better nurses than those who simply outbid on salary.
Nurse turnover in aged care is expensive. A conservative industry estimate puts the cost of replacing one registered nurse at between one and two times their annual salary, once you account for recruitment, temporary staffing, and the clinical knowledge a long-tenure nurse carries.
For Tasmanian aged care providers, where the pool of experienced candidates is structurally limited, every preventable resignation carries a heavier price than it would in a larger mainland market. The cost is not just financial. It is also clinical continuity, team stability, and the morale of the nurses who watch a colleague leave and ask themselves the same question.
What the research says about why nurses leave
The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety (2021) identified workforce issues as central to the quality problem in the sector. Nurses who left cited high workloads, inadequate staffing ratios, and management culture as the dominant reasons, with pay important but rarely the first factor.
The 2023 Fair Work Commission Aged Care Work Value Case addressed remuneration directly, awarding registered nurses a 15 per cent pay increase from July 2023, with further increases flowing through to enrolled nurses and personal care workers. That correction mattered. It did not fix a toxic culture, an unmanageable workload, or a career dead end.
A consistent finding across Australian aged care workforce research is that nurses who describe themselves as likely to leave within the next twelve months are significantly more likely to cite emotional exhaustion and lack of management support than pay alone. If your turnover is high, a salary increase alone is unlikely to be the answer.
| Reason nurses leave | Addressable without additional headcount? |
|---|---|
| High workload and poor staffing ratios | Partially — rostering practices and delegation matter |
| Lack of management support | Yes — a direct management response |
| No career pathway | Yes — internal development programmes |
| Rostering inflexibility | Often yes — renegotiated working arrangements |
| Poor team culture | Yes — time and leadership commitment |
| Pay below market | No — requires budget |
Three things that actually improve retention
**Career development** is the retention lever most operators underuse. Nurses who can see a clear pathway from RN to Clinical Nurse Specialist or Nurse Unit Manager are more likely to stay long enough to walk it.
Investing in continuing professional development, supporting graduate nurse programmes, and making leadership roles visible and achievable costs less than a single replacement hire. In a small Tasmanian facility it also creates a culture signal: this employer takes its nurses seriously.
**Rostering flexibility** has become a genuine retention driver, not a perk. The demographic of nurses in Tasmanian aged care is broad, from new graduates to experienced nurses in their fifties. Providers who offer a genuine range of working arrangements, part-time, compressed hours, consistent shifts for those who need them, will keep nurses that rigid rosters push away.
**Visible, accessible leadership** matters more than most operators acknowledge. The relationship between a nurse and their direct manager is one of the strongest predictors of whether they will stay. Nurses who describe their NUM as fair, accessible, and genuinely invested in their team are consistently more likely to remain.
In small Tasmanian facilities, where everyone knows everyone, a problematic NUM is particularly hard to manage quietly, and particularly hard to work around. Getting the leadership hire right, and then supporting that person, is one of the highest-return investments an operator can make.
The Tasmanian context
Tasmania’s aged care sector operates in tight geography with a limited pipeline of nurses. The state has one of the oldest and most rapidly ageing populations in Australia. According to AIHW workforce data, Tasmania produces fewer nursing graduates per capita than most other states, and that gap is not closing quickly.
Operators who treat retention as a strategic priority rather than a routine HR matter are building a genuine competitive advantage. A good nurse in Tasmania has real options. The providers who make them feel valued, visible, and career-progressing are the ones who keep them.
What operators tend to get wrong
The most common mistake is treating turnover as a recruitment problem rather than a retention problem. When a nurse leaves, the instinct is to start advertising the role. The more useful question is why they left and whether anything can be changed before the next nurse reaches the same point.
The second mistake is assuming the problem is pay. Post-2023, pay is less likely to be the primary driver of departure than it was. Operators who respond to turnover with a salary increase but leave the management culture, workload, and career structure unchanged will see nurses leave again at a similar rate within twelve months.
The third, and least visible, mistake is treating your high performers as though they will tolerate conditions that push others out. The nurses most capable of finding alternative employment are the ones who will find it. The nurses who stay despite poor conditions are not always the ones you most want to retain. Retention strategies that do not differentiate by performance risk keeping the wrong people and losing the right ones.
In a market the size of Tasmania, that effect compounds. A provider with a reputation among Tasmanian nurses as a difficult place to work will not only struggle to fill vacancies. They will also receive fewer strong applications when they do advertise, because good nurses hear about the culture before they apply. The inverse is equally true: a provider known as a genuinely good place to work will receive unsolicited approaches from nurses who are not actively job-hunting but whose colleagues recommend it. Building that reputation takes time and consistency, but it is available to any operator who commits to it.
A practical starting point
If you do not have clear data on why your nurses are leaving, start there. Exit interviews are the minimum. Stay interviews, which ask current nurses what would have to change for them to consider leaving, are more useful.
What you find will almost certainly not be one thing. It will be a cluster of workload, culture, and development factors. Addressing them in order of impact, rather than in order of ease, is what separates operators who stabilise their workforce from those who remain in a permanent recruitment cycle.
For providers who have not run a stay interview before, start with your two or three longest-serving nurses. Ask open questions, not closed ones. What do you value most about working here? What would have to change for you to start looking elsewhere? What do you tell other nurses about this place? The answers will be more useful than any survey tool, and they cost nothing but an hour of your time. Most nurses will tell you the truth if they trust that you are asking in good faith.
A pay rise does not fix a toxic culture, an unmanageable workload, or a career dead end.
If you are a Tasmanian aged care operator dealing with high turnover or struggling to fill senior nursing roles, Community Health Connect works with providers across the state to find the right candidates and think through what keeps them.
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