Nashville, Tenn.-based HCA Healthcare is no longer embedding training costs into nurse contracts, according to a May 9 report from NBC News.
In March, the news outlet found that the practice of hospitals sticking recent nurse graduates with the cost of training programs if they leave or are terminated before their contract ends has become increasingly common, based on a review of more than a dozen nursing contracts, interviews and data from nurse surveys. In some instances, contracts required nurses to repay their employer as much as $15,000 if they left before their contract expired.
At the time of NBC's reporting in March, the agreements were in place in a "handful of our markets, including some hospitals where National Nurses United expressly agreed to such commitments on behalf of the nurses they repressent," an HCA spokesperson told Becker's. Most of the system's 184 hospitals did away with the contracts in early 2022, and they're no longer being used at all now.
"Despite our substantial investment in the training and professional development of new graduate nurses, we recently made the decision to no longer require a work commitment," the health system said in a statement to NBC. HCA declined to comment on whether they will enforce contracts that have already been signed or reimburse nurses who left early.
Hospital officials at HCA and UCHealth in Aurora, Colo., previously said embedding training repayment into contracts is a long-standing practice and that professional development programs for nurses are a significant investment, costing hospitals up to $100,000 per nurse for the first year. UCHealth stopped requiring repayment earlier this year.
"These educational and training programs are more comprehensive and substantive than any 'standard job orientation' could ever be," HCA told Becker's. "We feel confident that the majority of the thousands of other nurses who completed a program and who continue to work in our hospitals understand the value and benefit that we provided to them, at the outset of their nursing careers."
HCA recently invested more than $300 million to expand the Galen College of Nursing and to create new nurse education programs.