Assessment of factors contributing to motivation of Health care workers in public health facilities in Gedeo Zone, Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People's Region

Abstract

Background: - The quality of performance in health facilities to a large extent depends on available human resource mix and their motivation. Although employee motivation is a significant element of health systems performance, it is largely understudied and little attention has been paid to this issue in developing and poor countries. In Ethiopia fewer studies were mostly on physician and nurse’s motivation, and furthermore little is known about which determinants of motivation are most important to different cadres of workers. Hence this study was an attempt to address this information gap. Objective: - To assess factors contributing to motivation of health care workers in public health facilities in Gedeo Zone, South nations, nationalities, and people’s region. Methods: - Facility based Cross-sectional study design were used, using both quantitative and qualitative data collection method. The study was conducted from March to April 2011 in Gedeo Zone. Stratified sampling technique was used and the sampling frame in this study were divided in to five groups (stratum) as 1/ physicians, 2/ nurses 3/ other health professionals 4/ health extension workers and 5/ supporting staffs. Data entered to epi-data and exported to SPSS version 16.0 for analysis. Each scale was subjected to factor analysis to investigate the underlying components and to reduce the number of items based on eigenvalue. Appropriate statistical procedures (descriptive analysis such as: frequency, percentage and graph) were used for description and inference and Multiple linear regression was used to identify predictors of motivation Result: - A total of 311 health care workers participated in this study. These were 8(2.5%) physicians, 114(36.7%) nurses, 42(13.5) other health professionals, 88(28.3%) health extension workers and 59(19%) supportive staffs. The ranked order of motivation determinants for all study subjects were (i) social reward, ii) respect by community, iii) professional advancement and iv) rule of health facility. The mean motivational level scores for the five professional category ranged from 7.5 (Physicians) to 15.6 (Supportive staffs), and on overall motivation about 40% of the study subjects scored above uncertain. Conclusion and recommendation: The results of this study are in agreement with the literatures which focused on Health care worker’s motivation. And the respondents in this study reported that the socio-cultural and organizational factors were major motivational determinants. In motivating workers, Provision of opportunities, such as professional advancement, career development & training, should be fair and based on work performance.