Estimating employment longevity of nursing personnel.

Health-care managers require estimates of employment longevity (time from hire to termination) for use in assessing future pension obligations, costs that are functions of longevity and experience such as fringe benefits, and workforce stability. Existing approaches for obtaining these estimates are problematic, complicated by time-varying data or infeasible data requirements, and may result in biased estimators. Renewal theory is presented as a model for estimating the complete distribution of the longevity of a population when the only data available is censored (i.e., time on the job of current employees). The model's ability to estimate nursing personnel longevity is demonstrated.