MDH study: hospital nurses experiencing rising burnout, job dissatisfaction

MANKATO, Minn. (KEYC) - In 2023, the Minnesota Legislature charged the Minnesota Department of Health to study why more nurses were leaving positions of direct care at hospitals.

In 2026, Teri Fritsma, a lead healthcare workforce analyst who worked on the study, says that began from a misconception from around the time of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

According to the study, the State of Minnesota, had over 121,000 registered nurses in 2024 and over 151,000 registered nurses in 2025.

While more experienced nurses are retiring, Fritsma says overall that workforce is growing.

She says of the 55,000 registered nurses that MDH questioned during the survey, 40 percent were aged 35 or younger.

Fritsma says one fifth of those respondents were in their first two years of nursing.

When surveying nurses who had decided to leave the bedside, several themes emerged including high workload, inadequate training, high stress and problems with work-life balance.

Fritsma says when asking nurses about whether they were satisfied with their job, she discovered another trend.

14 percent of those questioned said that they were unsatisfied with their current conditions due to things like burnout, high patient loads, and feeling that management does not listen to their concerns.

“You have on the one hand a younger workforce, and on the other hand, we see in the data and anecdotally a lot of what we heard is patients are getting not just sicker... but also a lot more complicated in terms of their socioeconomic backgrounds, their level of income that create a constellation of factors that make them more complicated to care for and more challenging,” Fritsma said.

Two percent of in-hospital nurses also expressed concerns about violence from patients and their families as another reason they were considering leaving.

Fritsma says after talking with multiple focus groups, she says a lot of nurses feel that their job would be easier if management took more time to listen to their concerns.

River’s Edge Hospital in St. Peter says it hasn’t heard many of these concerns from its own nurses, but the hospital’s CEO, Paula Meskan, says she wasn’t surprised to hear about the results.

“I think one of the things that all hospitals struggle with is trying to balance the patient acuity and the nursing needs for that with the staffing constraints,” Meskan said.

She says her hospital employs 80 nurses, and to avoid overwhelming them, an emphasis is put on quality onboarding and communication.

Meskan says every new employee at Rivers Edge is assigned to a preceptor who will mentor them on policy, routine and general patient care to help them feel prepared for their new position.

River’s Edge also provides monthly rounding, where nurses can recognize their colleagues for their contributions, have one on one conversations with managers about pursuing further training and voice concerns about what they might need help with.

Meskan says using approaches like this the hospital grew its retention rate to around 88 percent in 2025.

As part of its conclusion, the MDH study recommends that care providers pursue several next steps to help retain nurses and promote higher quality patient care.

Those included implementing more manageable case loads, providing more clear and supporting communication, implementing reliable policies for physical and emotional abuse and providing more opportunities for professional growth.

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