Intention to Stay in Nursing Profession and Its Predictors among Nurses Working in Jimma Zone Public Hospitals, South West Ethiopia

Abstract

Background: Hospitals are facing difficulties to providing a consistent level of quality nursing care in a fastchanging health environment due to the shortage of experienced nurses which is a critical global issue. A number of nurses were quitting their profession to continue career in another profession in clinical and non-clinical fields. Factors that cause these problems were not investigated in Ethiopia yet. This study aims to assess the level of intention to stay in the nursing profession and its predictors among nurses working in Jimma Zone public Hospitals.Methods: Institution based cross-sectional study was conducted on 317 nurses. Structured self-administered questionnaires were used to collect data. Data were entered and cleaned by using Epi-data version 3.1 then exported to IBM SPSS version 20 for analysis. Independent sample t-test, one-way ANOVA, and linear regression were done to see mean difference and association of variables. P-value of less than 0.05 was taken as statistically significant.Result: The overall level of intention to stay is 57.75% of which 133 (42%) of them had low, 95 (30%) of them have moderate and the rest 89 (28.1%) have a high level of intention to stay in the profession. Organizational and professional commitment, working hospital, job satisfaction, organizational factor, and job-related stress were identified as predictors of intention of nurses to stay in their profession.Conclusion: The overall level of intention to stay is low. Only less than one-third of nurses have high intention to stay in their profession in this study. Improving this level of intention needs collaborative intervention in related factors which are a big homework for managers on health sectors of Jimma zone public Hospitals.