90+ Latest Healthcare Employee Engagement Statistics Every Health System Leader Should Know

Brandon Daniell
1 day ago
10 min read

Key Healthcare Employee Engagement Statistics

Nearly one-third of the healthcare workforce is still not engaged, and disengaged employees are 2x as likely to turn over as their highly engaged peers.
In a 2024 study of 800,000 nurses, 39.9% of RNs and 41.3% of LPN/VNs reported an intent to leave the workforce or retire within the next five years.
Hospitals in the top quartile for employee engagement are 4.2 times more likely to achieve top patient experience scores.
Nurse engagement was found to be the No. 1 predictor of mortality variation across hospitals, based on a study of more than 200 hospitals using standardized mortality and complication indexes.
Disengaged caregivers are 2.6 times more likely to leave their organization, and for an average health system with approximately 3,000 employees, turnover can cost more than $16 million annually.
The average cost of turnover for one staff RN was $60,090 in 2025, with hospitals losing an average of roughly $5.19 million per year to RN churn.
69% of organizations rely primarily on email for internal communications, conflicting with the 54% of deskless workers who have limited email access.

1. The State of Healthcare Employee Engagement: Current Levels & Trends

Healthcare employee engagement rose from 3.97 to 4.03 and physician engagement from 3.96 to 4.01 in 2025 - the largest gains in eight years - based on feedback from more than 2.6 million healthcare employees and physicians.

More than a third of healthcare employees (35%) and providers (37%) say they lack confidence in senior leadership.

Healthcare employee engagement dropped by 0.02 points in 2024, based on feedback from 2.3 million employees.

Only 78% of healthcare employees feel their organization cares about their safety - a 2-percentage-point dip from the prior year.

After an initial post-pandemic rebound, healthcare employee engagement declined slightly in 2024 - a decrease of 0.02 on a 5-point scale, with the steepest declines among physicians (-0.06) and advanced practice providers (-0.08) - based on input from over 1.4 million healthcare employees.

Nationally, healthcare employee engagement rose for the first time since the pandemic, from 4.02 (out of 5) in 2022 to 4.04 in 2023.

Nearly one-third of the healthcare workforce is still not engaged, and disengaged employees are 2x as likely to turn over as their highly engaged peers.

Millennials, who make up over a third of the healthcare workforce, report lower engagement scores than their peers (3.89 vs. 4.12 among non-millennials).

Engagement among healthcare leaders dropped 3.7% over three years and is one of the few positions that has not started to recover from COVID-induced declines.

The typical healthcare organization's engagement score dropped 2.9 points year over year, from 71.5% to 68.6% - the first such decline on record - across 4.02 million respondents from 557 health systems.

Intent to stay among healthcare workers fell 3.0 points to 72.3%.

The gap between the most and least engaged healthcare systems grew from just .23 points four years ago to .74 by early 2024 and .83 six months later.

More than 90% of healthcare workers have a clear understanding of their company's mission and values and how their roles contribute to organizational success.

Effective change management is the most critical driver of employee engagement in healthcare organizations.

Healthcare employees in the U.S. are, on average, more engaged at work than workers in industries other than healthcare.

Among healthcare leaders, engagement rises from 37% at Stage 1 listening maturity to 88% at Stage 4 - a 51-point gap.

2. Engagement, Burnout & Intent to Leave in the Healthcare Workforce

One in five healthcare workers who were at their organizations in 2022 left the following year, with even higher turnover among new hires and nurses.

Between 2024 and 2025, 29% of disengaged healthcare employees left their organizations, compared with 19% of those who felt neutral.

Generation Z healthcare employees have the highest turnover rate at 35%, while baby boomer turnover rose from 19% to 21%.

Physician burnout fell to 41.9% in 2025, down from 43.2% in 2024 and 48.2% in 2023, based on a survey of nearly 19,000 physicians across 38 states and 106 health systems.

In 2025, 42.9% of physicians reported feeling a great deal of stress related to their work, down from 45.1% in 2024 and 50.7% in 2023.

Physicians reporting that they feel valued by their organization rose to 56.2% in 2025, a 1.7 percentage point increase, though gender differences remained notable (59.6% of male vs. 53.3% of female physicians).

Physician job satisfaction held roughly steady from 2024 to 2025, increasing slightly from 76.5% to 77%.

Across 72,193 well-being assessments of healthcare workers in 2025–2026, burnout across all healthcare groups remained at 49%.

In a September 2024 poll, 27% of medical groups reported having a physician leave or retire early in 2024 due to burnout.

In a 2024 study of 800,000 nurses, 39.9% of RNs and 41.3% of LPN/VNs reported an intent to leave the workforce or retire within the next five years.

Of nurses planning to leave within five years, approximately 41.5% cited stress and burnout as the root cause.

Since 2022, more than 138,000 nurses have left the workforce due to retirement, burnout, or stress.

58% of nurses feel burned out most days, and only 39% plan to be in their current positions in 12 months.

64% of nurses suffer from compassion fatigue and 33% are nearing retirement.

In a survey of 1,155 nurses, 55% reported they were extremely or somewhat likely to change jobs in 2024.

Roughly 40% of nurses say they intend to leave or retire within five years, most often citing stress and burnout.

Nearly half of surveyed healthcare workers (49.9%) met the criteria for burnout, with work overload identified as the strongest predictor.

Higher levels of engagement are associated with lower levels of presenteeism and lower sickness absence rates among NHS staff.

Nurses are four times more likely to exhibit presenteeism compared to other occupations, threatening patient safety through increased patient falls, medication errors, and staff-to-patient disease transmission.

Healthcare support occupations have the highest absence rate in the U.S. at 4.3%, versus 2.4% for professional and technical services occupations.

3. Nurse & Physician Engagement Specifically

While APP and RN engagement increased significantly in 2025, both continue to report lower engagement (APP at 3.94 and RN at 3.97 on a 5-point scale) than other healthcare roles.

There is a management gap in healthcare engagement: senior leader engagement sits at 4.59 and management at 4.27, followed by a large gap down to 4.09 and below for nonmanagement roles.

Nurse engagement rose +0.04 to 3.89 in 2024, showing signs of improvement among a historically less-engaged group.

In a 2017 benchmark survey of 76,419 nurses, 60% were disengaged from their workplace.

A single-institution study of 510 registered nurses found that only 31% of nurses were actively engaged in the workplace.

In a study of 425 hospitals across 4 U.S. states, 42% of hospitals were classified as having the "most engaged" nurses, 36% "moderately engaged," 19% "somewhat engaged," and 3% "least engaged."

Recognition sits at just 65% among nurses, and only 61% feel appropriately involved in decisions affecting their work - nearly 10 points below other groups.

Advanced practice provider engagement dropped 0.08 points and physician engagement slid 0.06 points in 2024, with just 52% of APPs feeling heard by leadership.

Nurse engagement with the organization and profession reduces compassion fatigue, burnout, and turnover while improving teamwork, patient experience, and organizational outcomes across clinical, operational, cultural, and behavioral measures.

In a study of 549 registered nurses, those with lower levels of work engagement reported increased job burnout and turnover intention.

Only 19% of healthcare workers report being consistently recognized.

4. Engagement's Impact on Patient Outcomes, Safety & Experience

Hospitals in the top quartile for employee engagement are 4.2 times more likely to achieve top patient experience scores.

In a large-scale meta-analysis, top-quartile business units for engagement had a 58% difference in patient safety incidents (mortality and falls) compared with bottom-quartile units.

Highly engaged business units achieve 81% lower absenteeism, 18% higher productivity, and 23% higher profitability.

Healthcare organizations with highly engaged employees experienced 41% lower patient safety incidents and 41% fewer quality defects.

Nurse engagement was found to be the No. 1 predictor of mortality variation across hospitals, based on a study of more than 200 hospitals using standardized mortality and complication indexes.

In English NHS acute trusts, a one-standard-deviation increase in overall staff engagement was associated with patient mortality rates around 2.4% lower.

All else being equal, 5% more staff working in well-structured teams was associated with a 3.6% lower mortality rate.

A peer-reviewed study found that each 1-unit higher workforce engagement score was associated with a 4.4% lower Summary Hospital-level Mortality Indicator in the same year, across English NHS acute trusts.

A 2024 panel study of national NHS staff survey data from 2012–2019 confirmed that engagement, satisfaction, and recommendation-of-employer all significantly negatively correlated with adjusted inpatient mortality (SHMI).

A systematic review and meta-analysis found a small but consistent, statistically significant relationship between healthcare staff engagement and patient safety (11 studies; r = 0.22; n = 30,490).

A study of 26,960 nurses across 599 hospitals in 4 states found that nurses reporting lower engagement also described worse patient safety in their work environment, exacerbated by higher patient-to-nurse ratios.

Highly engaged healthcare teams see a 15% increase in patient safety.

Hospitals that score higher on team member engagement surveys also see higher patient experience scores, with the top-performing quartile of hospitals on staff engagement in 2023 scoring in the 80th percentile on patients' likelihood to recommend.

There is a strong positive correlation between safety culture scores and employee engagement in healthcare, and the magnitude has intensified since the start of the pandemic.

Lower RN turnover rates are associated with fewer patient falls - with smaller hospitals (100–200 beds) saving $105,000 per year and larger hospitals (400–500 beds) saving $616,000, based on 2023 data.

5. The Financial Impact: Turnover, Retention & the Cost of Disengagement

Disengaged caregivers are 2.6 times more likely to leave their organization, and for an average health system with approximately 3,000 employees, turnover can cost more than $16 million annually.

Low-engagement healthcare organizations experience turnover rates around 24%, compared with closer to 15% at high-engagement organizations.

Disengaged healthcare employees are 1.7x more likely to leave.

The average cost of turnover for one staff RN was $60,090 in 2025, with hospitals losing an average of roughly $5.19 million per year to RN churn.

The national staff RN turnover rate rose to 17.6% in 2025, reversing the prior year's decline.

Each percent change in RN turnover stands to cost or save the average hospital $289,000 per year.

The average cost of turnover for a staff RN rose 8.6% in 2024 to $61,110, with a range of $49,500 to $72,700.

First-year RN turnover stands at 22.3%, meaning many nurses don't make it past month 12.

The average time to recruit an experienced RN sat at 78 days (RN Recruitment Difficulty Index) in 2025, still over 2.5 months.

Facilities scoring in the top quartile of nurse engagement outperform those in the bottom quartile on RN turnover by 5.6 percentage points, translating to $313,000 in cost savings per 100 RNs.

Over a five-year period, an average hospital turns over more than 100% of its staff, and financial losses tied to nurse turnover run between $5.2 and $9.0 million per hospital per year.

A vacant primary care physician role can lead to roughly $1 million in lost revenue over six months, and an unfilled family medicine position costs a hospital about $175,994 in opportunity cost for a single month.

Disengagement cost the world economy more than $10 trillion in lost productivity, and only 20% of employees worldwide were engaged in 2025.

Turnover rates were approximately 0.6% lower in NHS trusts with a one-standard-deviation higher engagement score, and an equivalent increase would save around £150,000 in salary costs for an average acute trust.

Ely-Bloomenson Community Hospital, a 21-bed critical access hospital, achieved an 80% increase in employee engagement over five years and reduced turnover to just 1% through a recognition program.

The national hospital turnover rate is 22.7%, and only 19% of healthcare workers report being consistently recognized.

Well-recognized employees are 45% less likely to have turned over after two years, based on a study tracking nearly 3,500 employees.

Turnover rates for front office staff across medical practices hit 40% in 2022, and clinical support and business operations support staff turnover rates were 33%.

6. Communication & Technology's Role in Healthcare Employee Engagement

Frontline and deskless employees, who represent the majority of the healthcare workforce, are predominantly on-site and consistently report the lowest engagement levels; reaching them requires mobile-first tools.

Approximately 80% of the global workforce is deskless - nearly 2.7 billion people, outnumbering desk-based workers roughly four-to-one - and in healthcare that figure is higher, as nurses, clinical assistants, and patient-facing technicians work in motion and rarely sit at a workstation.

25% of healthcare frontline workers say poor information access directly harms the patient experience.

Less than a quarter (24%) of frontline workers feel their feedback is heard.

69% of organizations rely primarily on email for internal communications, conflicting with the 54% of deskless workers who have limited email access.

60% of deskless workers report being unsatisfied with the technology provided to do their jobs, citing limited access to corporate communication systems.

A regional hospital network leveraged SMS alerts for critical staffing changes, cutting nurse absenteeism by 12%.

More than 95% of text messages are read within three minutes of being sent, making texting a powerful channel for time-sensitive healthcare staff communication.

A Fortune 500 employer with 12,000 staff across 20 states used two-way texting to drive wellness program participation, and completed wellness activities jumped 70% - 5,079 additional employees finished their activities and avoided premium surcharges.

Poor information access and frontline friction cost U.S. organizations more than $80 billion annually in lost productivity.

84% of leaders recognize internal communication's impact on talent attraction and retention, and 81% are clear on the connection to the bottom line.

75% of deskless workers now use technology during their shifts, yet most organizations still rely on bulletin boards and break room posters as their primary communication channel for this workforce.

Investing in technology and onboarding ensures 69% higher retention rates for frontline workers.

Change management effectiveness has become the number one driver of employee engagement, and only 59% of executives and 54% of managers express confidence in their organization's ability to manage change effectively.

Managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units, based on an analysis of 27 million employees.

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