Improving health care performance by strengthening health staff motivation in transitional countries

Social and economic development of any society is directly connected with the strong health of its population. The latter can be provided only by well-qualified and highly motivated health workers, which are capable to supply services of high quality. Thus, the problem of health staff motivation takes up dominant position in every health care system.
This paper aims at elaborating a set of recommendations directed at strengthening health staff motivation in transitional countries. Its achievement foresees pursuing in-depth analysis of factors which promote and prevent high level of health workers motivation, determining the strength of their influence on labor behavior and developing a complex of measures, which realization is essential for raising health staff motivation.
The research is performed on the results of health staff survey carried out by the authors in Ukrainian public hospitals in 2006. The questionnaire includes 21 questions concerning workers’ personal and professional profiles, job satisfaction and factors which motivate and demotivate them to perform well. The total number of randomly surveyed doctors was 1047. As a scientific framework for the study publications of World Health Organization, International Labor Organization and United Nations, which deal with health staff motivation, are used.
The research results prove that in the health care sector financial, non-financial and administrative methods of motivation are equally important. According to it, we elaborate the scheme of universal mechanism, which can be used for strengthening health staff motivation in any transitional country. It is based on a complex of political, economic, organizational and socio-psychological levers at the state, regional, organizational and individual levels which are to make health workers to perform well by achieving the concordance of their interests with the interests of society.