Racial Harassment, Job Satisfaction and Intentions to Quit: Evidence from the British Nursing Profession

We investigate the determinants of perceived racial harassment at the workplace, and investigate its impact on job satisfaction and quitting behaviour amongst ethnic minority nurses. To enable this we use data from a unique large-scale survey of British National Health Service nurses. Nearly 40% of ethnic minority nurses report experiencing racial harassment from work colleagues, whilst more than 64% report suffering racial harassment from patients. The experience of racial harassment at the workplace is found to lead to a significant reduction in job satisfaction, which, in turn, significantly increases nurses’ intentions to quit their job. These results are found to be robust to endogeneity concerns, and have important policy implications for retaining qualified nursing staff in the British National Health Service.