®Unsafe. Unsupported. Tired.
What 43 Australian nurses told the MACH Health® app about their bodies, their shifts and whether they will stay, between May 2025 and January 2026.
A shortfall of 70,707 nurses by 2035.
The Australian Government's Nursing Supply and Demand Study projects an undersupply of 70,707 full-time equivalent nurses by 2035: 26,665 in acute care, 21,765 in primary health care and 17,551 in aged care. Every nurse who leaves early widens that gap.
Retention is usually measured once a year, by survey. Those snapshots tell a health service how its workforce felt last year, not how the nurse starting a shift this morning is doing.
Unsafe care is routine, not rare. And it tracks staffing.
82.6% of nurses reported at least one occasion in the past month when workload or staffing stopped them delivering safe care. Between them, 23 nurses described 177 episodes in a single month.
Where nurses rated staffing as inadequate, the median was 10 episodes. Where it was adequate, 0.5. Nurses who said safe care was not routine in their workplace reported a median of 15, against 1.5 for those who said it was.
Unsafe-care episodes in the past month, by staffing
Median times in the past month a nurse felt unable to deliver safe care, by how they rated staffing. Baseline survey, n = 23 Australian nurses, self-selected.
Recovery, not confidence, separates the nurses thinking of leaving.
56.5% had considered leaving their role in the past month because of work pressure. What set them apart was rest between shifts: 61.5% of them said they did not get enough time to recover, against 10% of those staying.
Confidence in their own clinical ability did not differ. The nurses thinking of leaving are not the less capable ones. And unlike pay, rest between shifts is something an employer can change through rostering: shift spacing, quick returns and runs of consecutive shifts.
Not enough rest between shifts to recover
Share who disagreed they had enough rest between shifts to recover. Baseline survey, n = 23 Australian nurses, self-selected.
The nurses you can least afford to lose are the most at risk.
Intent to leave rose with age, and physical check-in scores fell in the same pattern. The mid- and late-career nurses the system depends on most were the most physically depleted and the most likely to be thinking of going.
The 35 to 49 group reported the most unsafe care and the least rest between shifts.
Considered leaving in the past month, by age
Share who considered leaving their role in the past month, by age. Baseline survey, Australian nurses. Small groups: read as direction, not precise rates.
Nearly half of check-ins started physically depleted.
Physical state was the weakest of the four check-in domains. Only a quarter of check-ins began energetic, and 13% began exhausted. When nurses felt physically drained, they usually felt emotionally low too.
An early pattern to test with an employer: physical scores on days off were no better than on working days, and depleted check-ins tended to be followed by more.
Check-ins starting depleted, by domain
Share of Daily Check-Ins scoring 1 or 2 (depleted) in each domain, with the mean score. 90 check-ins from 21 Australian nurses.
Three words for the past month at work.
"Tired" was the most common word on both sides. The difference is that nurses thinking of leaving named the system: safety, support, respect and expectations.
Nurses considering leaving
- Unsafe, unsupported, unrealistic expectations
- Frustrating, disappointing and exhausting
- Tired, frustrated, stressed
- Unsupported, overlooked and disorganised
- Hard, challenging, overworked
- Tired, unsupported, disrespected
- Dangerous, unsafe, overwhelming
- Sick of the system
- Busy, stressed, draining
- High workload
Nurses not considering leaving
- Excluded, undervalued, draining
- Busy admin leadership
- Mostly pleasant
- Up and down
- Leading, overstimulated, tired
- Tired, connection, anxious
- Good
- Pretty nice and good
De-identified survey responses, shown in full. 20 usable responses.
What you would see that you can't see today.
01
A daily physical-state signal
The most common and most persistent signal. A run of depleted check-ins is an early, specific flag.
02
A safety signal linked to staffing
Unsafe-care counts by ward and month: a frontline view of safety that incident reporting tends to miss.
03
A retention signal you can act on
Rest between shifts was the clearest marker of intent to leave, and rostering can change it.
04
A focus on experienced staff
See where mid- and late-career nurses are most depleted, before they decide to go.
A small group, a consistent pattern.
These are 43 Australian nurses who chose to download the app, mostly through The Nurse Collective, with no employer behind the deployment. They are likely more depleted than the average nurse, and none of these findings should be generalised to the whole workforce. This is an internal analysis paper, not peer reviewed.
But the pattern is consistent across every measure: nurses arriving physically depleted, working in conditions where safe care regularly slips and, for those not getting enough recovery, actively thinking about leaving. That pattern is specific enough to test in an employer deployment. That is the next step.
Be the first Australian employer deployment.
We are looking for an aged care provider or regional health service to build MACH Health into every shift, and measure what changes.