Renee Thompson

Renee Thompson works on the specific reason nurses leave that most retention programs never name: how they are treated by each other.

She spent more than thirty years in healthcare as a clinical nurse, nurse educator, quality manager and nurse executive before founding the Healthy Workforce Institute in 2011, and her subject is bullying and incivility in clinical settings. It is a more concrete problem than culture in the abstract. It looks like a charge nurse who withholds information from a new graduate, a surgeon whose behavior everyone works around, a unit where the same person is excluded from handover, and a manager who has been told about all of it and has no idea what to say.

Her argument is that this is a leadership skills gap rather than a personality problem, and that it persists because front-line leaders are asked to address disruptive behavior without ever being taught how. The work is therefore built around what a manager actually says in the moment, which is why it is delivered as often in workshop form as from a stage.

She holds a doctorate in nursing practice, is a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing and a Certified Speaking Professional, and wrote Enough! Eradicate Bullying and Incivility in Healthcare, a guide written for front-line leaders and since updated for a post-pandemic workforce.

Health systems book her when exit interviews and engagement surveys keep pointing at the same units, and the sessions suit nursing conferences, leadership development days and organization-wide culture work.