MACH Health

18/02/2026

The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) just marked one year since Scotland’s Nursing and Midwifery Taskforce report aimed at stabilising the workforce, and the verdict is clear: talk has outpaced action. The Taskforce set out 44 recommendations to fix recruitment and retention, yet nurses are still telling leaders conditions aren’t improving and many are thinking about quitting.

Here’s what matters most, and why it should matter to you:
• Breaks nurses are legally entitled to aren’t reliably happening. That’s a basic human need, not a “perk.”
• Wellbeing support remains patchy, still reactive rather than preventive.
• Workforce planning tools still don’t reflect real nursing shift realities, that’s a systemic blind spot with very real burnout costs.
• With ~40% of nurses in Scotland planning to leave their roles, the stakes have gone nuclear.

There are early signs of momentum, like a new Chief Nursing Officer recognising the scale of the problem, but recognition without funded ex*****on and clear timelines is just nice PR.

Here’s the blunt truth: health systems globally are flirting with disaster if they don’t take actionable, funded steps on workforce retention right now. Nurses don’t need more promises, they need better rosters, funded wellbeing infrastructure, and workforce metrics that reflect real life, not spreadsheets.

What’s your view: what’s the single most impactful change leaders should prioritise today to stop nurses from walking away?



https://www.rcn.org.uk/news-and-events/Blogs/taskforce-180226

This link will take you to a page that’s not on LinkedIn

18/02/2026

Midweek we go straight at another issue the profession struggles to hold.

Joined by powerhouse nurse leader Kimberley Maurer, we’ll take apart the uncomfortable truths shaping modern nursing.

This is not a vent session.
It’s structural analysis.

Expect conversation around:

System-induced strain

Leadership accountability

The career forks nurses face

Why silence keeps repeating the same outcomes

Clarity over comfort. Always.

� 6:30PM GMT
� Live on LinkedIn & Facebook

16/02/2026

What can nursing in the 1970s teach us about 2026?

This Monday, Patricia Temple joins us as our Wise Nurse Elder to reflect on generational knowledge, professional identity, and what we’ve gained, and lost, along the way.

This isn’t nostalgia.

It’s perspective.

We’ll explore:

What nursing culture used to prioritise

How moral load has evolved

What younger nurses deserve to inherit

Why generational wisdom still matters

If you’ve ever wondered whether we’re repeating cycles we should have already learned from — this one is essential.

� 6:30PM GMT
� Live on LinkedIn & Facebook

12/02/2026

We’re live with Misty Carey, and this conversation matters.

Misty’s work sits where nursing is often stretched the thinnest and expected to carry the most:
rural and Indigenous health.

This isn’t a story told from a distance.
It’s lived experience , of working in under-resourced settings, navigating cultural safety, and building education and advocacy where systems are slow to show up but the need is immediate.

Tonight we’ll explore:

What rural and Indigenous nursing really demands beyond policy language

How education becomes advocacy when access is limited

Why equity in healthcare can’t be designed from metropolitan assumptions

What nurses need to practise safely, ethically, and sustainably in these spaces

This isn’t charity talk.
It’s competence, respect, and truth.

If you care about nursing beyond the hospital walls and about designing systems that work for all communities, this one is essential.

12/02/2026

Last night with Kimberly Maurer wasn’t comfortable.

And that’s exactly why it mattered.

Kimberly Maurer — The Hard Conversation We Avoid
4

We talked about the tension most nurses feel but rarely say out loud:

The fork in the road between clinical credibility and management responsibility.

At what point does a great clinician become “management”?
And at what cost?

Kim didn’t sugar-coat it.

She spoke about:

The isolation of nurse leadership

The emotional tax of carrying complaints from both directions

The pressure to protect the organisation while protecting your team

The silent erosion of identity when you move away from bedside

Here’s the truth:

We promote clinically excellent nurses into leadership…
Then we give them KPIs, spreadsheets, and staffing gaps — but not always the structural authority to fix the problems.

That’s not a leadership failure.

That’s a systems design flaw.

11/02/2026

Wednesdays, we are live with Kimberley Maurer, holding space for the kind of conversation nursing usually sidesteps because it’s confronting, political, and deeply personal.

We’re digging into the real inflection points in a nursing career, the moments that quietly decide whether someone stays, disengages, or walks away.

Not the glossy milestones.
The forks no one prepares you for:

When values collide with survival

When experience stops being protected and starts being exploited

When leadership feels like leaving your clinical identity behind

When staying silent feels safer than telling the truth

Kim brings clarity without cushioning it. This isn’t venting. It’s naming the mechanics of why nurses leave, while they’re still on the roster.

If you’ve ever felt that slow internal shift where the job stops fitting who you are, this conversation will land.

10/02/2026

Chronic pain is not a side issue in nursing.
It’s a structural one.

This live brings together Joe Carter-Hawkins and Liam Carter-Hawkins from Elyfia to name what is usually ignored: chronic pain is embedded in the nursing workforce and quietly shaping careers, exits, and wellbeing.

Up to 65% of nurses live with ongoing pain — musculoskeletal injury, fatigue syndromes, fibromyalgia, and chronic conditions that are normalised as “part of the job.” The result isn’t just discomfort. It’s reduced capacity, moral strain, early attrition, and a workforce expected to endure rather than be supported.

Elyfia was built to challenge that model.
Not by telling people to push through, but by designing support that makes pain visible, manageable, and legitimate.

This conversation is not about motivation or mindset.
It’s about reality.

Chronic pain as a workforce issue, not an individual weakness

The cost of ignoring pain in nursing design

Why “resilience” fails when pain is untreated

How Elyfia and MACH Health are working to break this cycle with nurse-centred solutions

This is a statement:
You cannot design nurse wellbeing without addressing pain.

And the system has waited long enough to hear that said out loud.

09/02/2026

If you missed Patricia Temple – our Wise Nurse Elder discussion, put it on your must-watch list.

Patricia didn’t romanticise the past. She contextualised it. Decades of nursing history laid bare how the profession has been shaped by resilience, moral courage, and collective responsibility — long before “burnout” became a buzzword and systems became spreadsheets.

What landed hardest was this:
many of today’s challenges aren’t new — but our memory of how nurses survived them has been lost.

From mentorship that happened by default, to professional identity grounded in purpose (not KPIs), Patricia reminded us that modern nursing is standing on the shoulders of heroes — and we’ve stopped looking up.

There are lessons here for today’s nurses, leaders, and systems under strain:

You don’t innovate by erasing history

You don’t fix workforce problems by ignoring wisdom

And you don’t build the future by silencing your elders

If you care about where nursing is heading, you need to understand where it’s come from.

🎧 Catch the replay with Patricia Temple
Because sometimes the way forward starts by listening back.I

09/02/2026

This Monday, Patricia Temple grounds us in lived nursing history,not nostalgia, not sentiment, systems understanding.

Patricia began her nursing life in the 1960s.
A time when nursing didn’t train confidence.
It trained compliance.

That line can sound confronting without context, so here it is.

The system was structured, hierarchical, and designed to produce safe, skilled, dependable nurses, and in many ways, it worked.

Nurses were trained thoroughly.
Learning happened by doing.
Students were part of the workforce, not observers.
They mattered.

Formation didn’t stop on the ward.
Tea rooms and shared nurses’ homes were places to decompress, talk things through, laugh, cry, and regain perspective after hard shifts. Long before we had language for it, nurses were debriefing.

Hierarchy gave clarity and progression.
Authority was respected — not because nurses were passive, but because structure supported learning, safety, and accountability.

Discipline mattered.
Sometimes it felt almost military.
But nurses weren’t stuck.
They were becoming.

This is why the Wise Nurse Elder sits at the start of our week.

Mondays aren’t about fixing nurses.
They’re about understanding what nursing was given, what it was denied, and what later generations must not lose as we redesign nurse health, wellbeing, and professional identity.

This isn’t nostalgia.
It’s pattern recognition.

And that’s why this Monday matters.

05/02/2026

“If you want to know the health of a profession, ask whether its people would recommend it.”

According to a recent Medscape report, only 1 in 8 nurses would recommend nursing as a career.

Let that land.

This isn’t a recruitment problem.
This isn’t a resilience problem.
And it’s definitely not a “new generation” problem.

This is System-Induced Strain, fully exposed.

When nurses stop recommending nursing, it tells us three brutal truths:

The work has become unsustainably heavy

The psychological and moral load is being normalised

The system is quietly relying on silence, not solutions

We keep asking nurses to cope instead of fixing the conditions that require coping in the first place.

Long hours. Chronic understaffing. Unsafe ratios.
Moral distress without recovery time.
Wellbeing support that arrives after the damage is done.

And then we act surprised when nurses say: “I wouldn’t tell someone I care about to do this.”

That should terrify health leaders.

Because when recommendation collapses, retention follows.
When retention follows, costs explode.
And when experience walks out the door, patients pay the price.

This is not about burnout buzzwords.
It’s about systems designed without nurses at the centre.

Until we measure, design, and intervene during the working day — not after the exit interview — this number won’t improve.

So here’s the real question:

👉 If only 1 in 8 nurses would recommend the profession… what does that say about the system we’re asking them to survive in?

Only 12% of UK nurses would recommend their profession — despite most reporting job satisfaction — as harassment, discrimination, and workload pressures take a toll.

01/02/2026

System-induced strain isn’t a Western healthcare problem.
It’s a global workforce failure — and it’s hitting developing nations hardest.

This research shows what nurses have been saying quietly for years: when systems are under-designed, under-resourced, and misaligned with reality, strain compounds faster than resilience ever could. In low- and middle-income countries, that strain isn’t just burnout — it’s workforce collapse, migration, moral injury, and care gaps that ripple through entire communities.

Different setting. Same root cause.
When we export broken systems instead of fixing them, the damage multiplies.

If we keep treating nurse wellbeing as optional, we don’t just lose staff — we lose healthcare itself.

The question is no longer whether this is happening.
It’s how long we keep pretending it’s isolated.

Introduction Workplace stress is an ongoing global and local challenge in healthcare, driven by high demands, long hours, and emotional strain, requiring urgent attention to safeguard workers’ well-being and ensure quality care. Objective This study assessed workplace stress, support systems, and ...

28/01/2026

🔥 Tonight we stop skirting the edges and ask the question nursing keeps avoiding.

What has gone so wrong with nursing?

Not in soundbites.
Not with blame-shifting.
Not wrapped in comfort or corporate language.

Tonight’s live with Kimberley Maurer is about naming the reality honestly — how a profession built on expertise, ethics, and care has been pushed into chronic survival mode.

This conversation will go where others won’t:

How system decisions quietly dismantled nursing autonomy

Why “resilience” replaced safe design

How moral injury, overload, and role erosion became normalised

What nursing has lost — and what it must reclaim

This is not a vent.
It’s a clarity conversation.

And it matters even more because Wednesday nights with Kim are now a weekly fixture — a standing space for truth, courage, and non-compromising dialogue.

⏰ Tonight – Live

6:30 PM GMT (London)

1:30 PM New York (ET)

10:30 AM Los Angeles (PT)

5:30 AM Sydney (AEST)

📍 Access

This session is live inside The Nurse Collective.
👉 To get the link, join our communities:

LinkedIn Group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/17460026

Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1444533433277410

MACH Health UK & Australia users can also join directly in the app

UK app users: use exclusive access code MACHEARLY

This isn’t comfortable.
It’s necessary.

If you’ve ever felt nursing drift away from what it was meant to be —
be in the room tonight.