Are the Healthcare Professionals Really Satisfied with What they Cared? Evidence from an Armed Forces Hospital in Taiwan

Abstract

Squeezed by the new reimbursement policy of the National Health Insurance (NHI) in Taiwan, the Armed Forces Hospitals (AFH) had to serve general citizens as well as military clients. A dual role of military services and resource generator it acts in the current healthcare industry. Consequently, the job satisfaction of hospital staffs had thus been influenced. Taken the importance of the employee’s job satisfaction in customer satisfaction as well as in overall profit into account, the current research wished to reveal the current levels of the hospital employee’s job satisfaction, and to compare the differences of the perceived importance and the actual experience of satisfaction attributes. Main questions this research to answer were “Does the healthcare professionals satisfied with what they perceived important?” and “What are the main discrepancies exist that worth for investing? Using a structural questionnaire as an instrument, 474 valid responses from an armed forces hospital in central Taiwan were used as sample. The study reveals that there are significant differences between perceived importance and experience in each dimension, of which the compensation system was perceived the most important and in the meantime having the biggest gap between expectation and experience. The findings suggest that the hospital managers should re-organize the compensation system by increasing the incentives of bonuses, promotions, while maintain those aspects with smaller differences such as job content and supervision to effectively motivate the hospital employees, and accordingly ameliorating medical service quality.