Job Satisfaction of Health Extension Workers in West Gojjam Zone, Amhara Region, Ethiopia
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Abstract
Background: Having highly satisfied health workers is one of the key resources for successfully implementing public health programs at grass root levels. Ethiopia implemented a nationwide Health Extension Program that is primarily staffed by health extension workers in rural areas in 2003. While the program is innovative and supposed to bring better health to the population in rural areas, studies done concerning the satisfaction of the health extension workers are rare. Therefore, the objective of this study was to measure the job satisfaction of health extension workers and identify factors associated with it.
Methods: A cross-sectional quantitative study was conducted among 282 health extension workers to assess their job satisfaction in West Gojjam Zone, Amhara Region, Ethiopia, in 2012. The sample size was determined using the single population proportion formula, and data were collected using a structured questionnaire containing satisfaction items on a Likert scale. The mean was used to report job satisfaction levels, while the multiple linear regression model was employed to identify factors associated with job satisfaction.
Results: Two hundred sixty-nine health extension workers participated in the study with a 95.4% response rate. The health extension workers’ overall mean job satisfaction score was 3.33 out of 5. Job satisfaction had a significant association with organizational culture (t-score = 2.115, p < 0.05), and workplace conditions (t-score = 7.607, p < 0.001). Job satisfaction was also strongly related to organizational citizenship behaviour, motivational properties of jobs, job preferences (p < 0.05), and job characteristics (p < 0.001).
Conclusion: The job satisfaction of health extension workers can be potentially increased by improving workplace conditions and organizational culture. The workers were dissatisfied with extrinsic factors which are critical elements for improving their satisfaction by making it possible for them to be well-addressed by decision makers and managers.
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© The Author(s). This article is published in the Ethiopian Journal of Health and Biomedical Sciences as an open-access article and is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format, provided the original author(s) and the source are properly cited.
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