Abstract
The UK healthcare workforce is in crisis with declining real wages and deteriorating working conditions. In 2023/24, various professional groups, including nurses, doctors, and radiographers, have engaged in strikes and protests. While media attention often centres on pay issues, underlying concerns about working conditions significantly impact staff wellbeing resulting in the sector’s recruitment and retention difficulties. Drawing on the sociology of turning points, we explore in-depth the turning points which ‘trigger’ healthcare professionals working in this context to prioritise their wellbeing to identify HRM best practices in this key sector. We ask three inter-related research questions: 1) What are the career turning points of individuals working under conditions of high job demands? 2) Are these career turning points internally or externally driven? 3) To what extent are these career turning points randomly generated? Building on Job Demands-Resources theory (Demerouti, et al., 2001), we study 28 hospital healthcare professionals who regularly face long hours, time pressure, physicality, and emotional burden on the job. We focus on those who have experienced ‘a turning point’ in their careers to identify the antecedents of the change. Although at an early stage of analysis, we already contribute to theory with the identification of our first - non-random environmentally driven - theme: the lack of support for front-line clinical managers by their own senior managers. In-depth data analysis is underway to understand this theme more thoroughly and to identify other themes to enhance our theoretical contribution. To contribute to practice, following the completion of data analysis, we will offer a set of best practice recommendations for HRM practitioners in this key sector to support healthcare professionals to retain/enhance both: a) their roles; and b) their wellbeing.