Desire for emigration and its relationship with social capital among nurses working in teaching hospitals in Golestan, Iran

Nurses are the main group of care providers in healthcare institutions. The migration of nurses is worrying and has reached an alarming point in recent years. This study was conducted to determine the willingness of nurses to migrate and to assess its relationship with social capital.

This was a cross-sectional study. The statistical population was all the nurses working in educational and therapeutic hospitals of Gorgan, Iran in 2021. After random stratified sampling, 503 nurses were included in the study Data were collected by Chub Basti's Desire to Emigrate Questionnaire and Putnam's Social Capital Questionnaire. The data was analyzed with the help of descriptive and inferential statistics methods in SPSS-24 software and significance level was set at 0.05.

The overall score of the questionnaire of willingness to migrate (0.67 ± 0.16) was relatively higher than the average level. The greatest impact on the desire to migrate was related to the dimensions of pull factors or attraction of the origin, push or repulsion factors of the origin, pull factors or attraction of the destination, and finally related to the dimension of the desire to migrate. The average score of social capital was 2.98 ± 0.56. The general score of willingness to migrate and all its dimensions had an inverse and significant relationship with the overall score of social capital and its dimensions so that as social capital and its dimensions’ decreased, the desire to migrate was increased.

With the reduction of social capital in the nurses, the desire to migrate increases. To reduce the desire to migrate abroad, the need for increasing social and institutional trust through proper performance and solving structural problems seems essential.