School of Health Care Management, Shandong University, Jinan, China.
NHC Key Laboratory of Health Economics and Policy Research (Shandong University), Jinan, China.
PLoS One. 2019 Jan 25;14(1):e0211345. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0211345. eCollection 2019.
There is a deficiency of healthcare administrators in China as compared with other countries; furthermore, the distribution is unequal. To inform an effective policy intervention, it is crucial to understand healthcare administration students' career decision-making. This study aims to investigate the undergraduate students' stated preferences when choosing a job.
A discrete choice experiment (DCE) was conducted among a population-based multistage sample of 668 final year undergraduate healthcare administration students during April to June 2017 in eight universities of China to elicit their job preferences. Attributes include location, monthly income, bianzhi (which refers to the established posts and can be loosely regarded as state administrative staffing), training and career development opportunity, working environment and workload. Conditional and mixed logit models were used to analyze the relative importance of job attributes.
All six attributes were statistically significant with the expected sign and demonstrated the existence of preference heterogeneity. Monthly income, workload and working environment were of most concern to healthcare administration students when deciding their future. Among the presented attributes bianzhi was of the least concern. Sub-group analysis showed that students who have an urban background and/or with higher annual family incomes were willing to pay more for working in the city. In addition, students from western and middle universities valued bianzhi higher than students from eastern universities.
This is the first study focusing on the career decision-making of Chinese healthcare administration students at a critical career decision-making point. Both monetary and non-monetary interventions could be considered by policy-makers to attract students to work in health institutions, especially in rural and remote health institutions in China. There exists preference heterogeneity on healthcare administration students' job preferences, which should also be taken into account in developing more effective policy incentive packages.
相较于其他国家，中国医疗保健管理人员短缺，且分布不均。为了制定有效的政策干预措施，了解医疗管理专业学生的职业决策至关重要。本研究旨在调查本科医管专业学生的就业选择。
2017 年 4 月至 6 月，采用基于人群的多阶段整群抽样方法，对中国 8 所高校的 668 名医管专业应届本科毕业生进行了一项离散选择实验（DCE），以了解他们的就业偏好。属性包括地点、月收入、编制（可大致视为国家行政编制）、培训和职业发展机会、工作环境和工作量。采用条件和混合对数模型分析工作属性的相对重要性。
所有六个属性均具有统计学意义且符合预期，并显示出偏好异质性的存在。在决定未来时，医管专业学生最关心月收入、工作量和工作环境。在呈现的属性中，编制最不受关注。亚组分析显示，来自城市背景或家庭年收入较高的学生更愿意支付更高的城市工作费用。此外，来自西部和中部高校的学生比来自东部高校的学生更看重编制。
这是第一项聚焦中国医管专业学生在关键职业决策点的职业决策的研究。决策者可以考虑采取货币和非货币干预措施，吸引学生到医疗机构工作，尤其是在中国农村和偏远地区的医疗机构。医管专业学生的工作偏好存在偏好异质性，在制定更有效的政策激励措施时也应考虑到这一点。
