Development of a brief instrument for assessing healthcare employee satisfaction in a low-income setting

• Published in: PloS one 2013-11, Vol.8 (11), p.e79053-e79053
• Main Authors: Alpern, Rachelle, Canavan, Maureen E, Thompson, Jennifer T, McNatt, Zahirah, Tatek, Dawit, Lindfield, Tessa, Bradley, Elizabeth H
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Beliefs, opinions and attitudes; Coefficients; Cognitive ability; Community Health Centers; Consistency; Data Collection - methods; Data Collection - statistics & numerical data; Employee benefits; Employee retention; Employees; Ethiopia; Factor analysis; Health care; Health care policy; Health care reform; Health Personnel - psychology; Hospital administration; Hospitals; Human resources; Humans; Income; Job Satisfaction; Leadership; Literature reviews; Low income areas; Low income groups; Management; Market surveys; Maternal & child health; Medical personnel; Medicine; Midwifery; Motivation; Nurses; Occupational health; Pilot Projects; Polls & surveys; Public health; Reliability analysis; Reliability aspects; Reproducibility of Results; Reproductive health; Retention; Salaries and Fringe Benefits - statistics & numerical data; Shortages; Supervisors; Surveys; Surveys and Questionnaires; Workers; Workforce; Working conditions
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0079053

Ethiopia is one of 57 countries identified by the World Health Report 2006 as having a severely limited number of health care professionals. In recognition of this shortage, the Ethiopian Federal Ministry of Health, through the Ethiopian Hospital Management Initiative, prioritized the need to improve retention of health care workers. Accordingly, we sought to develop the Satisfaction of Employees in Health Care (SEHC) survey for use in hospitals and health centers throughout Ethiopia. Literature reviews and cognitive interviews were used to generate a staff satisfaction survey for use in the Ethiopian healthcare setting. We pretested the survey in each of the six hospitals and four health centers across Ethiopia (98% response rate). We assessed content validity and convergent validity using factor analysis and examined reliability using the Cronbach alpha coefficients to assess internal consistency. The final survey was comprised of 18 questions about specific aspects of an individual's work and two overall staff satisfaction questions. We found support for content validity, as data from the 18 responses factored into three factors, which we characterized as 1) relationship with management and supervisors, 2) job content, and 3) relationships with coworkers. Summary scores for two factors (relationship with management and supervisors and job content) were significantly associated (P-value,