Attrition of Knowledge Workforce in Healthcare in Northern parts of India – Health Information Technology as a Plausible Retention Strategy

Indrajit Bhattacharya, Anandhi Ramachandran, R.K. Suri, S.L. Gupta

Faced with a global shortage of skilled health workers due to attrition, countries are struggling to build and maintain optimum knowledge workforce in healthcare for delivering quality healthcare services. Forces that affect healthcare professionals’ turnover needs to be addressed before a competent uniformly adoptable strategy could be proposed for mitigating the problem. In this study we investigate the effects of the socio–demographic characteristics on attrition of healthcare knowledge workforce in northern parts of India that have a wide gradient of rural and urban belt, taking into account both public and private healthcare organizations. For this purpose healthcare professional attrition tracking survey (HATS) was designed. The data has been collected from a random sample of 807 respondents consisting of doctors, nurses, paramedics and administrators to explore the relationships between various factors acting as antecedents in affecting the job satisfaction, commitment and intention of a healthcare professional to stay in the job. Structured questionnaires were utilized as the data collection tools. Descriptive statistics, factor analysis and path analysis were carried out using multiple regression and correlation to propose a model that best explains the theoretical assumption of factors leading to attrition. Six factors of attrition namely compensation and perks, work life balance, sense of accomplishment, work load, need for automation and technology improvement, substandard nature of work have been identified as the main factors with a data reliability of 0.809%. It has also been identified that the intention to shift is a major decision maker that affects attrition and in turn affected by job satisfaction dimensions. Based on the survey response and analysis, a highly possible strategy of utilizing information technology implementation for increasing worker motivation, job satisfaction and commitment to reduce attrition has been proposed.

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