Improving Retention Together

Why is staff retention important?

Retaining the knowledge, skills and experience of the NHS Wales workforce is essential to sustaining safe and high quality patient care.

Strong retention supports staff wellbeing, work–life balance, motivation and engagement and ensures new starters are nurtured and effectively integrated.

By protecting the expertise of its later stages of career workforce and building a strong pipeline of new recruits, NHS Wales can better meet evolving service demands and changing skill requirements.

For patients, this leads to more consistent, safe and high‑quality care delivered by experienced healthcare professionals within supportive, stable teams.

How can you help?

Improving colleague retention across NHS Wales is everyone’s responsibility and it is important that we all play our part in supporting each other to Belong, Thrive and Stay.

To help you make a difference, HEIW has developed a range of retention improvement resources in partnership with organisations across NHS Wales. These resources were developed as part of the National Retention Programme for NHS Wales, which HEIW led on between 2023 and 2026.

Useful resources