High Hiring Rate of Nurses in Catalonia and the Rest of Spain Hides Precarious Employment from 2010 to 2019: A Quantitative Study

Aim: This study aims to describe the hiring of nurses in Catalonia and the rest of Spain over 10 years.

Background: Precarious employment (PE) has negative consequences for nurses' quality of life and work performance.

Methods: Quantitative study using a retrospective, longitudinal, descriptive design. We analysed publicly available employment data from Catalonia and the rest of Spain.

Results: Nurses are among the health professionals with the lowest proportion of open-term (permanent) contracts, 25% during the first 4 years of employment. During the study period, each nurse hired had an average of 3.44 contracts per year. The proportion of nurses with a fixed-term (non-permanent) contract shrank from 25.3% in 2006 to 20.5% in 2012 and grew rapidly to 38.7% in 2018. We estimate that 14,800 nurses signed fixed-term contracts in 2018 without ever having registered as unemployed in nursing.

Conclusion: High rates of fixed-term hiring and the high number of contracts per nurse are evidence of a high level of PE for nurses in Catalonia.

Implications For Nursing Management: When policymakers and workforce planners design recruitment and retention programmes for nurses, they should consider improving working conditions by extending more open-term contracts to combat PE and, indirectly, the shortage of nurses.