Job performance and associated factors among health workers in public hospitals of West Hararghe zone, Oromia Region, Eastern Ethiopia.

Abstract

Background: The success of any organization always depends on the participation and job performance of their employees. Health workers job performance level is cornerstone for better productivity of any health care organizations. Less performance of health workers reduces public hospital productivity and a reason for poor hospitalized patient health outcome. However, little was understood about job performance and associated factors in low-income countries like Ethiopia including the study area. Objectives: To assess level of job performance and associated factors among health workers in public hospitals of West Hararghe zone, Oromia Region, East Ethiopia. Methods: A health facility based cross-sectional study design was conducted by using quantitative methods among 422 health workers. The study was conducted from August 27 to September 17, 2018 on public hospitals in West Hararghe zones (Chiro, Galemso and Asebot Hospitals). Simple random sampling technique was used to select study participants. Data were collected from participants by using self-administered questionnaire. The data were entered in to Epidata version 3.1 and then exported to SPSS version 23 for analysis. Descriptive statistics such as frequency, percentages, mean and standard deviation were used to summarize the data. In bivariate analysis variables which had p-value p<0.25 were taken to multivariate regression model. Multivariate logistic regression was computed to identify predictor variables associated with level of job performance and variables with p ≤ 0.05 were considered statistically significant with 95% CI. Result: A total of 361 study participants were involved in the study with response rate of 86%. Among the respondents, 196 (54.3% were males. In professional types 243 (67.3%) were health professionals. The most predicting variable of health workers job performance: sex [AOR=1.896(1.130, 3.180)], marital status [AOR=1.910 (1.11, 3.27)], working hours [AOR=2.910(1.653, 5.123)], working condition [AOR= 2.164(1.128, 3.844)] and job satisfaction [AOR= 2.480(1.374, 4.476)]. Conclusion: The findings our study has indicated that health workers in West Hararghe zone in public hospitals have poor level of job performance. The strong predicting variable such as sex, marital status, working hours, working condition and job satisfaction were significantly associated with job performance. Regional Health office, Zonal health office and hospitals should give more attention on job satisfaction and working condition to improve health worker‟s job performance.