RESUMEN
AIMS AND OBJECTIVES: To increase knowledge about experienced nurses' understanding of a health-promoting work environment, health-promoting leadership and its role in retention of staff in the nursing workplace. BACKGROUND: The quality of leadership is imperative in creating supportive and health-promoting work environments to ensure workforce productivity and ethically sustainable caring cultures. More knowledge on how leaders can promote health and sustainable careers among nurses is needed. At a time of current and projected nursing shortage, it is important to understand the reasons why nurses intend to remain in their jobs. DESIGN: Qualitative descriptive. METHOD: Twelve experienced registered nurses participated in an individual, digitally recorded, semi-structured interview. Data were transcribed verbatim and subjected to qualitative content analysis of manifest and latent content. RESULTS: A health-promoting work environment should provide autonomy, participation in decision-making, skills development and social support. Health-promoting leaders should be attentive and take action. CONCLUSION: Health-promoting work environments enable nurses to flourish. Having ample autonomy is therefore important to nurses so that when they face new challenges, they see them as a way of using and developing their competencies. Although most nurses claim their own leaders are not health promoting, they have a clear understanding of how a health-promoting leader should act. The health-promoting leader should not only be attentive and promote skills development, but also cater for nurses' meaningfulness. RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE: Nurses in primary health care understand a health-promoting work environment to be a workplace where they can develop, not only clinical skills, but also flourish as human beings. Further, nurses find it health promoting to have a meaningful job, using their competence to make a difference for patients and their families. Nurse Managers have an important role in facilitating meaningfulness in nurses' jobs to retain nurses as a valuable asset for the organisation.