Targeted retention of mental health staff

Background

Poor retention of mental health staff has a serious impact on care quality, safety and patient outcomes. When experienced staff leave, services lose continuity of care, clinical knowledge and established relationships with service users. This also creates additional pressure for the staff who remain.

The financial impact is significant too. Replacing just one mental health nurse can cost between £25,000 and £40,000, contributing to an estimated annual cost to the NHS of around £200 million just to replace mental health nurses alone.

Traditional retention approaches often treat staff as a single, homogeneous group, offering the same generic programmes across different roles and services. However, our research shows that the reasons mental health practitioners consider leaving vary significantly between individuals, teams and clinical settings.

Solution

The Targeted Retention Service is a tech-enabled service that supports registered frontline clinical professionals working as mental health practitioners, including nurses, occupational therapists and social workers.

At the centre of the service is the Targeted Retention Tool, a web-based platform that helps organisations diagnose local retention risks and turn staff feedback into practical action.

The tool includes:

• An evidence-based staff survey to identify factors affecting intention to stay or leave
• Role-based dashboards that show retention risks and priorities at service level
• Evidence-based recommendations linked to the issues staff identify
• Role-based interactive action plans to support ownership, progress tracking and escalation of barriers
• Repeat cycles to help organisations monitor change over time

Targeted Retention combines this research-grounded tool with expert support to give organisations a clear, actionable retention strategy across multiple levels of the organisation.

The aim is to move beyond broad survey findings and generic retention guidance, helping organisations turn valuable staff feedback into visible, practical action.

Benefits

The Targeted Retention Service helps mental health providers to:

• Give frontline staff a structured way for their voices to lead change
• Ensure feedback is not just collected, but translated into visible action
• Respond to the real challenges staff are experiencing in their services
• Retain more experienced staff by addressing issues before people leave
• Reduce avoidable costs linked to recruitment, agency staffing, onboarding and lost productivity
• Protect the clinical knowledge, continuity and team stability that services depend on

Support

This project was originally derived from research funded by The Health Foundation and is now being developed with commercialisation support and funding from the University of Sheffield.