Study On The Mobility And Influencing Factors Of Human Resource In Public Hospitals In China

Mobility of human resource is defined as a person being hired by an organization or leaving it. For the past few years, along with the development of socialism market-economic system and the reform of hospital personnel system, the competition in health market has been much stronger and the mobility of health human resource has been more active. Chinese government has paid attention to the mobility of human resource and published a series of policies on it since 1983.There were a number of studies on the mobility of human resource on the basis of theories developed by Ravenstein, Lewin, Yoshiro Nakamats and Kuck. The studies could be categorized into four categories as the mobility among countries, the mobility among different regions in one country, the mobility among different levels in one region and the inflow and outflow of one organization. The mainly topics are 1) the influence and consequence of mobility, 2) the quantity and structure of inflow and outflow of human resource, 3) the influence factors to the mobility.According to literature review, it is found that there are three problems in researches on the mobility of health human resource in public hospitals in China. Firstly, most researches were done in 1990's, which could not reflect the current situation well. Secondly, most were focused on one hospital or one region, which could not give a good picture of the whole country. Finally, except for doctors and nurses, other staffs working in the hospital were less considered. Until 2005, the government has had no idea about how many health workers move from one job to another in China. Also, the studies on influence factors of mobility were experiential mostly. It is very important for health authorities and hospital managers to know what the current mobility situation is, what characteristic it has and what makes staffs move to make policies and improve management.The main aim of this paper is to describe the staffs' job mobility in public hospitals in China between 2001 and 2005, explore the factors which influence the mobility and provide evidence for government and hospitals to make policies and retain good staffs.The data is part of the research "HRM of health enterproses in China" conducted by the Department of Personnel of Ministry of Health. Stratified sampling is used to select samples in this study. According to development levels of economic and geographic distribution, we select Beijing, Liaoning Province, Shandong Province and Zhejiang Province in the east, Shanxi Province, Anhui Province and Hubei Province in the middle and Qinghai Province, Sichuan Province and Guangxi Province in the west. Hospitals are selected from different levels by the same method in every province. Quantity data of the human resource mobility of every hospital from 2001 to 2005 are collected, so are the quantity data from staffs. Also, some key-figures and focus groups are interviewed in this study. Finally, we get 232 valid questionnaires from public hospitals and 20421 from staffs. Description and cooperation are used to analyze the mobility of public hospitals human resource. Logistic regression and qualitative analysis are used to explore factors influencing the mobility.The main findings of this study are as follows: the mobility of human resource in public hospitals in China is active day by day and both the number of moving staffs and the rate of mobility are going up. Mobility brings more high-education and young staffs to the public hospitals. There is also big difference in different regions and different levels. Hospitals in the middle and the west face a bigger problem in brain drain than those in the east, so are those in lower levers. Multi-way analysis finds that some demographic characteristics such as gender, age, the title of a technical post, tenure, some organizational factors such as region, level, job category, role definition, role fitness, satisfaction to assess and distribution processes, organizational atmosphere, job satisfaction have notable impacts on staff's turnover intention. We also get factors such as income, career develop chances, interpersonal relationship, job status and job safety, social insurance system affecting the mobility.Policy implications include: 1) related governmental departments should carry out the policies that encourage health workers working in the less-developed regions and lower level organizations. 2) Public hospitals in the less-developed regions and lower level need create a good environment to attract staffs by improving management level, respecting every employee, helping them have a broad stage in career development. 3) Health statistic department should take the data of health human resource mobility into usual work and do more researches on the regions, organizations, even different types of health workers with high turnover rate.