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To retain nurses and prevent worsening the nursing shortage, a key opportunity is to better understand the drivers of complete and partial retirement of older nurses. This study investigates the characteristics that distinguish older nurses' partial and complete actual retirement behavior, from those continuing to work, over a three-year period. A quantitative longitudinal design comprising 217 female Australian nurses aged 50 years or over, from two samples working at Time 1 (2012 and 2016), responding three years later (Time 2). Multinomial regression found two different patterns of drivers for each of completely retiring and partly retiring respectively. Age was the only variable distinguishing both partly and completely retired nurses from nurses who were not retired. The further variables distinguishing completely retired nurses were not being prosperous, having impaired work ability, being partnered, not stressed at work and working part-time. The only variable beyond age distinguishing partly retired nurses was having a casual contract. Offering flexible work options in terms of working hours and contracts that suit the nurse's lifestyle and supporting nurses with health impairments to continue working are options that may lessen the number of nurses completely retiring and instead either remaining at work or partly retiring.

Nurse shortages pose a challenge in many countries and retaining existing nursing staff is crucial to addressing these shortages. To inform possible interventions aimed at retaining nurses, managers need a comprehensive understanding of the nature of the nurse practice environment. The scales from two of the main instruments used to assess nurses' practice environments are tested. A survey of an online panel obtained responses from 459 Australian nurses. Analyses determined a combination of items with good construct validity and improved predictive utility for outcomes of interest for individual nurses. By essentially combining the best items from each instrument, a more comprehensive representation of the nurse work environment is obtained with improved predictive utility. The resulting combined set of scales is recommended for analyses of the nurse working environment and uses a combined set of scales from each of the two source instruments, namely: nurse participation in hospital affairs, recognition, nursing process, peer work standards, nursing competence, orientation, managers, resources, nurse-physician collaboration, and positive scheduling climate. Future research can then build on that strong set of items with a validated structure and predictive utility to inform management and interventions.

Elderly people living alone are a large and growing proportion of the population of many developed economies. The elderly, particularly those living alone, are more likely to be hospitalized overnight, with consequent substantial health and financial costs. A widely used model of health service utilization is augmented with social issues that may specifically delineate some of the issues associated with living alone. A longitudinal survey of elderly (aged 65 and over) living alone in Australia with three time points over four years was analyzed using logistic regressions for overnight hospitalization. The main set of data (n = 672) had an average age of 75.91 years and was 70.2% female. The health need factors of self-rated general health and illness severity, along with comorbidity, were the key drivers of hospitalization. There were some individuals with prioritized access to hospitalization due to forms of health funding. The social issues did not independently stand out as drivers of overnight hospitalization, but the complexity of the inter-relationships between issues when studying the health of the elderly began to arise. The results enhance our understanding of health services utilization, within the context of a relatively universal health care system.

There is a need to better understand the drivers of hospital utilization for the large and growing number of adults living alone. The cumulative effect of health drivers can be assessed by initially considering clinically advised information, then considering issues that a general practitioner or the person themselves may know. Logistic regression analyses were conducted on longitudinal data from the Household, Income, and Labor Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey with three time points over four years (n = 1019). The significant predictors of overnight hospitalization were the presence of a long-term health condition (Time 1), hospitalization severity and comorbidity (Time 1), work ability (Time 2), physical functioning (Time 2), being separated/divorced and having one or more health care cards. Health issues were predictive up to four years before the hospitalization window. That baseline risk of hospitalization was modified as symptoms and relatively salient changes in functionality accumulated. Specific sub-groups of hospital users had access due to insurance or special coverage. The impact of living alone on hospitalization may be able to be partly addressed through interventions such as improving access to primary care and using early warning triggers such as decreasing functionality to seek primary care before seeking hospitalization.

The study examines the impact of the psychological contract (PC), including the often-studied PC breach in addition to the novel approach of PC status, as predictors of performance among nurses, mediated by engagement, job satisfaction, and psychological distress. A sample of 177 nurses and midwives from a medium to a large hospital in Australia completed a self-report questionnaire. Structural equation modelling was used to determine associations between the predictors (i.e., negative affectivity (NA), PC breach, PC status)), mediating variables (i.e., engagement, job satisfaction, and psychological distress), and three types of performance behaviors: organizational citizenship behavior for the individual, for the organization (OCBI, OCBO) and in-role behavior (IRB) simultaneously. Specifically, psychological contract status positively predicted engagement, whereas breach negatively predicted engagement and positively predicted job satisfaction. NA positively predicted distress, and distress negatively predicted OCBO and IRB. Lastly, engagement positively predicted job satisfaction, OCBI, OCBO, and IRB. The findings indicate that psychological contract status may predict engagement (and in turn, performance) over and above psychological contract breach, and thus this novel construct should be examined further. The importance of engagement for predicting the performance behaviors and mental health of nurses may also offer new insights., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

The inadequate classification of retiree sub-groups ultimately results in misaligned policy. To generate sets of sub-groups that may be appropriately targeted for policy and interventions, variables are used that reflect the social structure of retirees, particularly the options of partial and complete retirement, marital status, gender, as well as the retirement status of the spouse, where relevant, and disability. Three sets of longitudinal Australian data were combined, each reflecting a four-year period (2003-2007, 2007-2011, 2011-2015) during which the individuals aged 45 to 69 retired ( n = 1179). A multiway frequency analysis was performed to develop an inductive, combinatorial model of retirement from work. The resulting parsimonious taxonomy of sub-groups of the newly retired reflected main effects and interactions of key social-structural variables. Notably, a key driver of the pattern of results was that couples tend to coordinate their retirement behavior in both the decision to retire and form of retirement. Non-partnered retirees were more likely to be women. Disability was also a driver of retirement for non-partnered retirees, regardless of gender. Identifying sub-groups based on combinations of retiree characteristics can better inform policy design, appropriate health promotion interventions and potential specific triggers for enacting those policies. Overall, marital status, spousal retirement behavior and disability may each present a more useful basis for a taxonomy of retirement than more individually oriented age- and wealth-based systems.

This paper investigates the links between the psychological contract and organizational justice variables on to performance behaviors through the mechanisms of engagement, job satisfaction and psychological distress, beyond the perception-oriented individual factor of negative affectivity. Nursing staff ( n = 273) from a medium to large Australian hospital completed a self-report survey. Structural equation modeling found differential effects of psychological contract breach and psychological contract status, the mediating roles of engagement, job satisfaction and distress on to performance behaviors, while noting the role of individual negative affectivity. Engaging nurses is critical to both their in-role and discretionary performance behaviors. Reducing negative impacts, particularly those due to breaking promises and unfair processes, while protecting the nurses' mental health, enables performance levels to be maintained. This study demonstrates that nurses' general perceptions of their employment relationship impacted their in-role and discretionary performance behaviors, especially through the mechanism of engagement. The complexity of managing nurses is highlighted by those variables that enacted positive impacts via engagement as versus the variables that led to distress and acted as brakes on performance, as well as the impact of the negative affectivity trait of the nurses.

In the context of a nursing shortage in many developed countries, one option for retaining the expertise of older nurses in the workforce is to better manage the retirement of nurses. This study will investigate life course predictors of actual retirement behavior, whether partial or complete, for older working nurses over a seven-year span. Data were analyzed from a quantitative, longitudinal survey of 178 Australian nurses aged 45 years and older working at Time 1 (2012), who responded seven years later (Time 2). Age predicted both forms of retirement behavior, confirming the strength of social normative pressures toward retirement. Moving against this social normative tide toward retirement were the predictors of partial retirement such as job satisfaction, physical functioning and work ability. In turn, working part-time was the only predictor, beyond age, of complete retirement. Nurse and health service managers could support nurses to stand against the tide of social normative pressures (until such social norms change) by managing the nurses' physical functioning and work ability, including by more explicitly managing the impacts of chronic diseases in the workplace, not least so as to retain their nurses in the context of nurse shortages.

HF transfer reactions between organic substrates are potentially useful transformations. Such reactions require the development of catalytic systems that can promote both defluorination and fluorination steps in a single reaction sequence. Herein, we report a catalytic protocol in which an equivalent of HF is generated from a perfluoroarene | nucleophile pair and transferred directly to an alkyne. The reaction is catalyzed by [Au(IPr)N i Pr 2 ] (IPr = N , N '-1,3-bis(2,6-diisopropylphenyl)imidazol-2-ylidene). HF transfer generates two useful products in the form of functionalized fluoroarenes and fluoroalkenes. Mechanistic studies (rate laws, KIEs, density functional theory (DFT) calculations, competition experiments) are consistent with the Au(I) catalyst facilitating a catalytic network involving both concerted S N Ar and hydrofluorination steps. The nature of the nucleophile impacts the turnover-limiting step. The cS N Ar step is turnover-limiting for phenol-based nucleophiles, while protodeuaration likely becomes turnover-limiting for aniline-based nucleophiles. The approach removes the need for direct handling of HF reagents in hydrofluorination and offers possibilities to manipulate the fluorine content of organic molecules through catalysis., Competing Interests: The authors declare no competing financial interest., (© 2022 American Chemical Society.)