Quality of Work life of Professional Nurses at Community Hospitals in Chanthaburi Province

Abstract

The objectives of this descriptive study were (1) to explore the levels of quality of work life of registered or professional nurses (RNs); (2) to identify RNs’ personal factors as well as organizational climate and head nurses’ leadership;  (3) to compare the quality of work life of RNs with differences in personal factors, organizational climate, and head nurses’ leadership; (4) to compare the quality of work life of RNs working at 30-bed and 60-bed community hospitals in Chanthaburi province.

        The study population was 453 RNs working at community hospitals in Chanthaburi province, and 223 of them were selected using stratified random sampling from two 60-bed hospitals and nine 30-bed hospitals, consisting of 53 and 170 RNs, respectively. Data were collected using a questionnaire with the reliability coefficient values between 0.84 and 0.93. The statistics used were frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation, One-way ANOVA and Independent Sample t-test.

        The results showed that, among participating professional nurses in Chanthaburi’s community hospitals, (1) their quality of work life was at a high level; (2) regarding personal factors, on average, they were 40.7 years old and married with 21–25 years of work experience, working at a professional level in inpatient departments, and had organizational climate and head nurses’ leadership at high levels; (3) working in different departments, under different organizational climates and head nurses’ leadership, was significantly associated with different quality of work life, p-value < 0.05; and (4) those working at 30-bed and 60-bed hospitals had no differences in their quality of work life.