Job Satisfaction of Doctors in Tertiary Care Hospitals: A Study of North-Western Region of India

Abstract

The physician satisfaction is of significance because of three reasons. First, physicians happen to be one of the strongest stakeholders in health care system. As such a thorough understanding of the factors affecting their satisfaction is critical to the emergence of a better way of imparting healthcare. Second, there has been found to be a significant positive relationship between physician satisfaction and patient satisfaction. Therefore greater physician satisfaction may lead to higher patient satisfaction and consequently higher patient compliance and better outcomes. Finally, understanding of physician satisfaction is inherently interesting in itself. A strong and thorough insight into the physician satisfaction is valuable as it will help us in identifying the factors contributing to physician satisfaction and thus enable us to counsel the current physician and address the new entrants into the profession. This is may be very significant as considerable time, effort and cost goes into training the physicians. A plethora of factors have influenced the practice of medicine in unparallel ways throughout the past decade. Presently Indian healthcare system comprises of many actors and organizations intertwined in a fragile and changing relationships. The existing understanding about physicians’ insight of their job is significantly scarce in Indian milieu. There is not much understanding about what drives and fulfills physicians about the practice of medicine or what influences their behavior. The purpose of this study is to develop a complete understanding of the factors that affect physician satisfaction using self developed physician satisfaction scale. Eighty two item scale representing eleven facets (comprised of sixty seven items) and three overall satisfaction measures (fifteen items) was obtained through literature review. The refinement of the scale on the basis of content validity, data quality and construct validity yielded a final instrument with fifty one items constituting eight facets (forty three items) and two global measures (eight items) of satisfaction. The internal consistency ranged between 0.776 to 0.907 - except autonomy which had internal consistency of 0.639 (Mehta and Kiran 2015). Regression analysis suggests certain demographic, work context and content factors influence overall physician job and career satisfaction. In depth analysis provide an insight into the factors that influence satisfaction in males, females, physicians employed in private and government vii hospitals. Correlation analysis indicates a strong and positive relationship between job and career satisfaction. ANOVA indicates statistically significant difference in perception of physicians employed in private and government hospitals towards job satisfaction. Also, it was found that there is statistically significant difference in perception towards job satisfaction on the basis of specialty. T-test indicated no statistically significant difference in job and career satisfaction of physicians employed in private hospitals, while in case of physicians employed in government hospitals the difference was significant. The results from this research might have significance for the organizational structure of the practice of medicine in India. Given the prevalent concern of high healthcare cost, restricted access to medical care for majority of the population, there may be a need for changes.