Rehabilitation Therapists Have Better Job Satisfaction Than Nurses in a Tertiary Rehabilitation Healthcare Setting: A Cross-Sectional Study.

INTRODUCTION

It is an established fact that job satisfaction of medical staff is a crucial factor that affects healthcare quality and plays a major role in the retention of qualified staff.

AIM

This study aims to assess the occupational satisfaction of nurses and physiotherapists in a tertiary rehabilitation institution, holding a bed capacity of 511 beds, by utilizing the Job Satisfaction Survey (JSS) questionnaire.

METHODS

This cross-sectional survey was conducted at a tertiary rehabilitation hospital between August and November 2022. The study targeted full-time nurses and rehabilitation therapists working in the institution using an English questionnaire focusing on the Job Satisfaction Survey (JSS) that was sent electronically to all eligible staff. The JSS questionnaire assessed job satisfaction and consisted of 36 items in nine domains of job satisfaction, which included pay, promotion, supervision, benefits, rewards, operational procedures, coworkers, work itself, and communications.

FINDINGS

The response rate was 64.43% among nurses and 64.93% among therapists. The satisfaction rate was higher among therapists (34.41%) compared to nurses (26.25%). The overall job satisfaction mean score was significantly higher among therapists compared to nurses at 149.28±27.12 compared to 143.14±31.67, respectively. This was also observed in the pay domain (13.06±4.06 versus 12.36±4.29), fringe benefits domain (12.77±4.89 versus 11.90±4.82), and coworkers' domain (15.55±3.67 versus 14.71±4.17), while it was significantly higher among nurses compared to therapists when looking at the promotion domain at 14.27±3.52 versus 13.75±3.16, respectively. When doing regression analysis, the odds ratio (OR) was the highest among bachelor nurses and those with more than 40 years of age for therapists.

CONCLUSION

Rehabilitation therapists are more satisfied than nurses with the main satisfaction domains being financial benefits in the form of pay, fringe benefits, and contingency rewards. Age, gender, and work duration did not show any significant value in this study, and overall, the dissatisfied group for both rehabilitation therapists and nurses did not manifest any difference in most of the job satisfaction factors.