Nurse absence--the causes and the consequences

This paper addresses nurse absence as it occurs in health care organizations and as a form of withdrawal behaviour from work. Absence represents a traditional domain of conflict between nursing management and their employees in day-to-day practice. The aim of the following discussion is to extend nursing management's understanding of the topic as a precondition for well-balanced schedules and effective human resource planning. A discussion of planned and unplanned absence thus arises and appropriate types of measurement, taking employee absence behaviour into account, are outlined. The implications of the arguments, developed in detail in the first part of the paper, are applied in the second part using a hypothetical account. In order to illustrate the importance of managing absence by nursing management, a method for calculating schedules is described which investigates the organizational control of planned and unplanned absence. This method proposes a seven stage calculation and highlights the processes that are essential for taking absence into account.