Role of stressors and job satisfaction in health surveillance assistants in Malawi
Date
2019-05-01
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Abstract
This study explored Health Surveillance Assistants’ (HSAs) role stressors and job satisfaction. The term community health workers (CHWs) is used as an umbrella term to embrace different health workers that work at the community level, including HSAs. The HSAs have been associated with many health gains, such as the reduction of child mortality. In the past their role was mainly preventive but now the curative role has been added. Following the addition of the curative role, many additional tasks have continuously been added to their existing roles. This is reported to have overloaded the HSAs. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore role stressors and job satisfaction in HSAs. Data were collected from 462 HSAs from the districts of Mangochi, Lilongwe and Mzimba. A self-administered questionnaire was hand delivered to a total of 462 HSAs with a response rate of 93.5%. The collected data was analyzed with the aid of the computer software package Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 23. Statistics used for the analysis included: Mean, Standard Deviation and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). The key findings of this study are that HSAs in Malawi have lower role ambiguity (16%) and moderate levels of role conflict (28%) and role overload (32%) and high job satisfaction (83%) (all 75th fractional rank percentile scores). In addition, HSAs role ambiguity (P= 0.001) and role overload (P=0.001) were significantly negatively related to job satisfaction, while role conflict (P=0.472) was insignificantly related to job satisfaction. HSAs tasks of vaccination and growth monitoring were frequently prioritized tasks (vaccination= 77.3%, growth monitoring = 73.7%). Among the three role stressors role ambiguity was the most important predictor (r = -0.34 and P=.01) of job satisfaction while advancement was the most important factor for job satisfaction (r =-0.34 and P= .01). Since role ambiguity was the major predictor of job satisfaction in this study, the supervisor was found as the most important factor for role ambiguity. The major recommendation to the policy makers at the Ministry of Health is that they need to take seriously the supervision of the HSAs in order to prevent and control role stressors and increase job satisfaction in HSAs.