Nurse shortages are substantial and increasing, making nurse retention critically important. This study is part of a project that aims to lay the foundation for developing a tool to help hospitals identify potential retention issues at an early stage and select appropriate interventions. The first study within this project was an integrative review, which showed that although many studies have investigated factors associated with nurse retention or turnover, the focus has primarily been on individual and organizational factors, with less attention paid to team-level factors. However, it is expected that team factors—such as team climate, leadership, teamwork, and communication—also play a significant role in nurse retention.

A second observation from the literature is that many analyses assume that individual-level observations are independent of team-level observations, whereas it is likely that individual and team-level factors are interrelated, and that the team context influences the retention of individual nurses. This implies that factors should be assessed in conjunction with one another. There is a need for insight into which interrelated factors play a role within nursing teams and how these influence retention and turnover.

Although not all relevant factors are routinely recorded, hospitals collect substantial data on their employees that can be used to investigate these relationships. This study protocol describes a retrospective cohort study that will use routinely collected hospital data to explore how individual and team-level factors are associated with nurse turnover, defined as both leaving the hospital and moving to another team or position within the same hospital.