Hospital organizational environment and staff satisfaction in China: A large-scale survey

The aims of the study are to explore the satisfaction of health-care staff in Chinese public hospitals with different aspects of their organizational environment and to identify factors affecting this satisfaction. The satisfaction of hospital staff members with organizational environment could be associated with the quality of patient care and patients' satisfaction. The design of the study is in the form of a survey. A questionnaire survey was performed from April to November 2008 to collect demographic characteristics of hospital staff members and analyse which organizational environment factors (hospital security policy and professional care, environmental security, safety of operations and management of human resources) influence staff satisfaction. Hospital members' satisfaction scores were high for hospital security policy and professional care but lower for safety of operations, the security of the environment and management of the human resources (lowest). Multivariate analysis identified that hospital size (large hospitals scoring highest), department (non-clinical department such as administrative or logistics department), professional title (student), position (administration) and years of employment (<3 years) were independently positively associated with overall satisfaction with organizational environment (P < 0.05). These results indicated that in China, hospital staff members were mostly dissatisfied with the administration and management of human resources. The organizational environment of hospitals should be improved to improve staff satisfaction.