When Mental Well-being Isn’t Enough: A Moderated Mediation Model of Clinician Retention in Turkey

In the post-pandemic era, clinician retention has become a global crisis, with burnout and turnover threatening patient safety and organizational stability. This study tested a moderated mediation model of retention risk among 336 hospital-based physicians and nurses/health technicians. Mental well-being was examined as an upstream resource associated with lower turnover intention through higher job satisfaction, while burnout was hypothesized to weaken the protective effect of job satisfaction on turnover intention. Using ordinary least squares regression with heteroskedasticity-consistent standard errors and 5,000 bootstrap resamples, mental well-being was positively associated with job satisfaction, and job satisfaction was negatively associated with turnover intention. Burnout was positively associated with turnover intention and attenuated the indirect pathway such that the protective effect weakened at higher burnout levels, with stronger moderation among nurses/health technicians than physicians. Findings support role-sensitive, system-oriented interventions that pair well-being and satisfaction supports with burnout-reducing work redesign.