Essay Sample on Job Satisfaction in the Healthcare Workforce

Introduction

Job satisfaction among healthcare workers is an essential factor in job quality and productivity. It is used to measure how content a health worker is with the job at the workplace. High job satisfaction contributes highly to the success and progress of the healthcare organization since it improves the enthusiasm of the staff. It can lead to high-quality service to patients and also high turnover. A dissatisfied healthcare staff may suffer from medical problems while individual employee's health can generally disrupt the stability of the healthcare staff. When a healthcare worker is unhappy, he or she may walk out of the workplace and the ones remaining may indulge in counterproductive activities such as the provision of low-quality services to patients and causing the damage of hospital equipment.

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For quality delivery of health services, human resources are a vital component since health systems cannot effectively function without a sufficient number of well-supported, skilled and motivated health workers. With all these in place, the employees (health workers) will feel satisfied hence delivering quality services to patients subsequently leading to the satisfaction of patients themselves. The key factors influencing job satisfaction in the healthcare workforce include;

The Working Environment and Condition of Health Workers

Working condition refers to the employee's work instruments, workplace, the work itself and organizational policy and rules. Factors such as the ventilation of the working environment, lighting, working hours, hygiene and temperature of the working room are some of the factors considered as far as working conditions is concerned (Merino et al., 2015). Health workers would instead desire working conditions which bring about greater real convenience and comfort. When workers are comfortable, they operate at their maximum best to give the best quality services to patients, and even the handle the health equipment with a lot of care and precision.

The absence of such comfort-factors may impact poorly on the health workers mental health thereby leading to poor service delivery due to dissatisfaction. An organizational culture which is favorable to the workers such as off days to workers plays a more significant role in enhancing employee satisfaction since they get the time out to rest their mental and physical conditions which when they resume work, are always at optimum.

An Opportunity for Personal Advancement for Health Workers

Employees and health workers, in particular, are motivated when they have challenging opportunities at their places of work. These opportunities include participating in jobs with a satisfying degree of challenge, participating in exciting projects such as research on the newly arising symptoms of a disease, an opportunity for increased responsibility like heading a team to carry out particular research.

Majority of health workers in the middle-level management in a health organization are always satisfied with the opportunities such as job promotions which thereby help them to enhance their carrier. However, this is not the case with those in the top and bottom parts of the organization's hierarchy since those at the top have no more positional level of advance to look up to anymore. Those at the bottom also feel hard judged since they are always not given these opportunities as they are ever done on merit (Shanks, 2016).

For the all of the health workers to feel satisfied at the workplace, a health organization should devise a way in which every worker (of every class of job description) should have the opportunity to enhance themselves. This subsequently leads to employee morale as every worker will feel motivated and having something to work for in line with further improving their carrier.

The Job Description of Health Workers

Job description always clarifies the roles of an employee, what is expected of them and what they are responsible for at the workplace. This diversity in the number of different duties in the healthcare organization depends on the qualifications required for specific roles. Health workers need to be accorded responsibilities as per their ability and requirement so that they can deliver on their best ability since employees always need tasks that develop their self-esteem.

A job should give the employees an opportunity to be themselves, do what they know best when they are at the workplace at the same time bring their best expertise when a group work needs to be undertaken. This allows health practitioners to have a positive attitude at the workplace which also injects good feeling to their co-workers (Schultz et al., 2015). This job description also includes the working shifts and the working hours of the medical staff. Therefore, a health organization should always review their job description to their employees and ensure that every employee is posted in a job which suits their qualification. This brings about perfect coordination at the hence ensuring that both the patients and the health workers are satisfied.

Salary Remuneration of the Health Workers

Improvement of the salary structure is key to job satisfaction in any sector. In the case of medical practitioners, the pay disparities is always a key factor leading to unsatisfied workers thereby leading to poor delivery of services in the hospitals and strikes. These always arise due to pay discrepancies and the delay in payment programs (Kok et al., 2015).

Most of the medical workers always feel that their efforts are under-rewarded in their payment. In other words, they feel underemployed. Remuneration is a significant factor to be considered by health organizations as it leads to workers satisfaction. This is because it is believed to be a fair process to reward workers according to their work input and competence. The study from world report 2006 states that in many countries in the world, health workers are paid salaries which is below the minimum living wage of their respective countries. This always leads to unrest amongst employees in health sectors thereby leading to poor service delivery to patients. Therefore, remuneration policies should be developed and implemented in health sectors bearing in mind the satisfaction of employees and management of the health organization.

Co-Workers in Healthcare

Co-workers emphasize the social behaviors at the workplace and are one of the external factors influencing the level of job satisfaction of employees in the health sector. Supportive co-workers play a critical role as they allow their fellow workers to thrive in their job areas through the offering of support in terms of advice, expertise and boosting morale at the workplace. On the other hand, co-workers who keep to themselves at job place always leads to negative feeling at the job place thereby leading to the dissatisfaction of employees since no one wants to be around people who are not unsupportive (Paille, 2016).

Conclusion

In conclusion, a low level of job satisfaction in the healthcare workforce is one of the difficulties faced by the health sector in terms of its effect on service delivery. This is because, from the discussed factors, it leads to a negative view of staff hence low level of performance. Therefore, there should always be a proper atmosphere amongst staff and the working environment and offer them good and quality facilities, their efforts recognize and rewarded appropriately for the workers to deliver quality service to patients.

References

Kok, M. C., Kea, A. Z., Datiko, D. G., Broerse, J. E., Dieleman, M., Taegtmeyer, M., & Tulloch, O. (2015). A qualitative assessment of health extension workers' relationships with the community and health sector in Ethiopia: opportunities for enhancing maternal health performance. Human resources for health, 13(1), 80.

Merino-Salazar, P., Artazcoz, L., Campos-Serna, J., Gimeno, D., & Benavides, F. G. (2015). National working conditions surveys in Latin America: comparison of methodological characteristics. International journal of occupational and environmental health, 21(3), 266-274.

Paille, P., Mejia-Morelos, J. H., Marche-Paille, A., Chen, C. C., & Chen, Y. (2016). Corporate greening, exchange process among co-workers, and ethics of care: An empirical study on the determinants of pro-environmental behaviors at coworkers-level. Journal of Business Ethics, 136(3), 655-673

Shanks, N. H. (Ed.). (2016). Introduction to health care management. Jones & Bartlett Publishers.

Schultz, D., & Schultz, S. E. (2015). Psychology and Work Today: Pearson New International Edition CourseSmart eTextbook. Routledge.