Work Factors and Commitment of Public Health Care Providers, in Oromiya Region, Ethiopia/2010: The Case of Equity and Extrinsic Factors

Abstract

Statistical report of the Ethiopian Federal Ministry of Health for the years 2006/7 shows that the number of health professionals in the country is insignificant compared to the demand of the population. The objective of this study is assessing the factors which reduce the commitment of the professional health workers and force them to flee away to other places. For that, a cross-sectional design with multi-stage stratified sampling technique on a total of 660 health workers was employed. Following, the reliability of our data collection tools was assessed and then, principal component analysis with varimax rotation to identify components of the composite extrinsic factors with higher variance was also done. After that, factor scores, correlations, and stepwise multiple linear regressions were calculated. A total of 573 participants with a response rate of 86.03% were included in the study. A two-factor solutions from the 10 items with Eigen values = 6.8 and 1.2 was extracted for extrinsic factors, which were called as extrinsic factor_1 & _2, and one factor of affective commitment_1 from 6 was also extracted. Lastly, extrinsic factors of work_1 & _2 (B = 0.202, 95% CI 0.152, 0.253, p < 0.0001 and B = 0.231, 95% CI 0.169, 0.292, p < 0.0001) respectively are considered as predictors of workers commitment. This implies that, the higher workers dissatisfaction with extrinsic factors of work, the lower their affective commitments will be. Therefore, policy makers in the ministry of health should revise their policy to bring some improvement on the extrinsic factors of work such as, salary, fringe benefits, and the incentive system of health care organizations by assessing the conditions of those factors in each health care organization.