Journal article
How health care workers choose their jobs: a discrete choice experiment in Ethiopia
published 9 September 2021
by Matthew Quaife, Shyam Lamba, Nikita Arora, Dorka Woldesenbet Keraga, Abiyou Kiflie, Dr Della Berhanu, Mehret Dubale, Professor Tanya Marchant, Professor Joanna Schellenberg, Dr Nasir Umar, Abiy Seifu Estafinos and Birkety Mengistu Jembere
published 9 September 2021
This study unlike many others, which interview doctors or medical students, aimed to understand job preferences of lower-skilled cadres such as community health workers, mid-skilled clinical care staff such as nurses and midwives, or non-patient facing staff who manage health facilities.
The study, authored by members of the IDEAS team, employed a discrete choice experiment to estimate which aspects of a job are most influential to health worker choices. A multinomial logistic regression model estimated the importance of six attributes to respondents: salary, training, workload, facility
quality, management and opportunities to improve patient outcomes.
Findings show that non-financial factors were important to respondents from
all three cadres: e.g., supportive management was the only attribute that influenced the job choices of non-patient-facing administrative and managerial staff. Training opportunities, supportive management and good facility quality were valued the most amongst health extension workers. Similarly, supportive management, good facility quality and training opportunities influenced the job choices of care providers the most. Earning an average salary also influenced the jobs choices health extension workers and care providers, which shows that a combination of financial and non-financial incentives should be considered to motivate health workers in Ethiopia.
Assistant Professor
Faculty of Public Health and Policy, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
Faculty of Public Health and Policy, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
School of Public Health, Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Assistant Professor
Research Fellow
IDEAS Principal Investigator and Professor
IDEAS Co-Principal Investigator and Professor
IDEAS Nigeria Country Coordinator and Assistant Professor
School of Public Health, Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Community-Based Newborn Care (CBNC) is an Ethiopian national initiative launched in March 2013 as a means of bringing life-saving care to mothers...
We are taking a mixed methods approach, conducting baseline and endline quantitative surveys supplemented by qualitative work halfway through the...
Back in 2009, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle developed a new strategy for the coming years, outlining how they might achieve...