Working in Cancer Clinic: Satisfaction and Dissatisfaction

Introduction: It is crucial to understand the practice environment of health care professionals working in cancer care in order to retain enough staff to deliver high-quality care to patients with cancer and their families (Shang et al. 2013). Health care professionals who work in cancer units face a lot of suffering, anxiety, pain, loss as well as hope of their patients. Work in cancer clinics is demanding, but also rewarding. So, it is very important to promote healthy work environment of staff to reach the best outcomes. One aim of international project INEXCA (http://www.uef.fi/en/web/inexca) was to explore the job satisfaction of health care professionals, as a part of healthy work environment, in cancer clinic. The objective of this presentation is describe the most satisfying and most dissatisfying factors of work in cancer clinic evaluated by health care professionals and discuss about the importance of them.

Methods: Cross-sectional questionnaire study was applied at outpatient cancer units in one university hospital in year 2017. Altogether 38 health care professionals from medication and radiotherapy units answered to the paper questionnaire. Most of staff members were registered nurses, radiographers, physiotherapists and others including few physicians. The instrument was Kuopio University Hospital Job Satisfaction Scale (KUHJSS) (Kvist et al. 2012). The scale has 37 items (range: 0-10) measuring job satisfaction and several demographic questions.

Results: Most of the respondents were women (87%). RNs were the biggest staff group (40%), 84% had permanent position and all of them worked day time. The most satisfying factors of work were: appreciation of own work (Mean 9.1), next were motivating client feedback (Mean 8.8), interesting work (Mean 8.5), appropriate work facilities (Mean 8.4) and feeling of being a competent employee (Mean 8.3). Dissatisfying factors were: inadequate salary (Mean 3.5), upper management did not appreciate the work (Mean 4.8), no chance for career development in hospital (Mean 5.0), workload was not distributed evenly (Mean 5.3) and information flow did not work well in unit (Mean 6.3).

Discussion: The intrinsic factors of health care professionals made them satisfied, instead the outside factors were dissatisfying. Appreciation of own work is very typical for Finnish health care professionals. We have found the same in our previous studies (Kvist et al. 2012, 2013). Patient feedback is highly satisfying factor and it means the ability to develop empathic relationships between the nurse and the patients, which is in positive correlation with higher job satisfaction (Park & Ahn 2015). Upper management is generally even located physically far away from staff in practice, so staff can feel not appreciated by leaders. It has been found in previous study that oncology nurses do not get enough support for their work, for example for sufficient staff resources from upper management of hospital (Bakker et al. 2013).

Conclusions: Work itself is very satisfying factor for health care professionals in cancer clinic. It is leaders’ responsibility to support the staff enjoy their work also in future. Upper management would also show their appreciation for the staff.