The Relationship Between Healthcare Providers’ Motivation And Patients’ Outcomes In Hospital Departments

Abstract

1. Introduction
It is widely recognized that human resources are the most crucial factor in patients' outcomes. Prior studies have identified the determinants of patients' outcomes as hospital policies regarding all hospital staff, but no work has been done to identify the characteristics of healthcare providers that are beneficial to patients' outcomes. This study intended to fill that gap by examining the relationship between healthcare providers' motivation and patients' outcomes. The fundamental hypothesis guiding this study is that healthcare providers' motivation is an important determinant of the service they provide to patients and of the patients' postsurgical outcomes. The growing interest of practitioners and the academic community in the issues of motivation signals the existence of a connection between motivation and productivity. Because of that, theoretical discussions of motivation emphasize a positive association between motivation and outcomes. However, this hypothesis has been rarely tested. The reason for the scarce empirical work might be that patients' outcomes are attributed to a variety of factors, such as patients' lifestyle, biological factors, and the work of many healthcare providers that influence the patients in the rest of the variables. The relationship between motivation and outcomes is masked due to the many contributory factors. We try to distinguish this relationship in one very specific element of the provision of healthcare services: the connection between healthcare providers and patients with respect to the department's services.
Methods
To highlight the relationships between levels of healthcare providers' motivation (i.e., basic needs, job crafting, calling to care, and self-care) with patient outcomes, an exploratory research design was applied. Fifty-four healthcare professionals (HCPs) working mainly in a day unit, distributed across four different academic hospitals, took part in different group development sessions. The outcome of this study was measured at two different points in time, with a one-year interval.
Conclusion
To sum up, our study confirms that not only is there a link between the different types of motivation, as defined in organizational psychology theory, and patients’ outcomes, but also that this link is modified by the setting or specialty the hospital departments are in charge of. As professional motivation could become the focal point for policy design on health workforce retention in their current positions. For instance, by stimulating autonomy and competence needs, hospital administrators in charge of management and motivation of the health workforce should be able to create ideal work conditions. Moreover, since these relations are more or less driven by the hospital departments’ specificity, policy designs should also consider the qualitative and resource needs specific to hospital specialist areas. This could be of special interest in order to face the critical issue of human resources for health in current times, when the majority of industrialized countries are discussing the proposed reforms and the possible efficiencies within the cuts to the health budget. The fact that for healthcare personnel in hospitals it is more important how their work achievement affects the well-being of the patients and not their own satisfaction and comfort seems to be crucial and widely accepted, but it still requires coherent implementation.