Job satisfaction among hospital staff working in a Government teaching hospital of India

Background: In a resource-limited and high burden disease setting, satisfied human resource is an asset in terms of high productivity, efficiency and quality care. Aim: To assess job satisfaction among permanent employees working in a government hospital. Materials and Methods: A sample of 200 staff members was interviewed using 34-item, Likert response based, modified job satisfaction scale. Key factors for job satisfaction were identified after subjecting data to principal component analysis, varimax rotation and multivariate analysis using step-wise regression procedure. Results: The mean job satisfaction index was computed to be in a similar range, but was found to be highest for nurses (0.68), followed by doctors (0.66), support staff (0.63) and technicians (0.62). Nine uncorrelated and critical factors related to job satisfaction that explained 68.09% of the variability was identified, that is, communication, pay/salary, working conditions, organization supervision system, co-workers, workload, benefits, career aspects and rewards. A positive association was reported between job satisfaction score and factor scores (units) of communication (0.133), benefits (0.110), working condition (0.027) and co-workers (0.032) and a negative relation with organizational supervision system (0.118), workload (0.093), rewards (0.035), pay/salary (0.034) and career prospects (0.017) respectively for all categories of respondents. However in case of doctors, co-workers (0.023 units) showed a negative relation. Conclusion: There is scope for interventions to enhance job satisfaction and concomitant continuous monitoring can be useful in determining various service aspects that necessitate improvement. By enhancing job satisfaction, hospital administrator can improve not only the mental, psychological and social well-being of work-force, but also the financial health of an organization.