High hiring rate of nurses in Catalonia and the rest of Spain hides precarious employment from 2010 to 2019 : A quantitative study

This study aims to describe the hiring of nurses in Catalonia and the rest of Spain over 10 years. Precarious employment (PE) has negative consequences for nurses' quality of life and work performance. Quantitative study using a retrospective, longitudinal, descriptive design. We analysed publicly available employment data from Catalonia and the rest of Spain. 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. 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. 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.