Job contentment among medical doctors: Warr-Cook-Wall questionnaire based study at an MTI based Tertiary Care Hospital.

Abstract

Objective: To determine job satisfaction level of doctors working at Ayub Teaching Hospital and correlate it to factors that affect job contentment with the help of a standardized tool. Study Design: Cross-sectional Analysis study. Setting: Ayub Teaching Hospital, Abbottabad. Period: First Two Weeks of December, 2019. Material & Methods: A self-administered online questionnaire was designed on Google Forms and was used to collect data from the doctors working at the aforementioned facility for more than three months. Data regarding various sociodemographic and professional characteristics as well as respondents’ views about their job as per Warr-Cook-Wall scale were noted. Pearson’s Correlational analysis, student’s t-test and one way ANOVA were applied for data analyze. Results: Among a total of 176 doctors, mean Job Satisfaction Score (JSS) was 37.56±13.35, which is below the neutral level, showing overall discontent and only 72 (40.9%) respondents were actually satisfied with their jobs. Highest content was noted for “Colleagues & fellow workers” and “Amount of Responsibility”, among the scale’s parameters. Whereas doctors were least satisfied with their “income”. Salary had a weak but statistically significant correlation with satisfaction score. Those working at basic medical sciences departments were more satisfied (p=0.006) and so were permanent employees (p=0.024). Professors were significantly more content (p=0.005). 71% of the doctors would like to be a doctor again if given an opportunity, whereas 63.1% would leave the country to serve abroad in case they get such an opportunity. Conclusion: Most of the doctors were not satisfied with their jobs. Among many factors, dissatisfaction with pay structure seems to be the most significant one. This discontent with their jobs is probably the reason most of them are willing to leave the country and serve abroad. Thus further research on the topic should be conducted to explore and implement strategies to alleviate this dissatisfaction.