Pictured are members of the Guardian Hospice Care Team in Alexandria, LA.
Are you satisfied with your hospice job? If a poll were taken today, do you think most of your fellow employees would share your feelings? How people feel about their jobs can impact their lives greatly. Taking time to evaluate job satisfaction can be informative, particularly for improving quality of life.
Hospice workers face unique challenges as they interact regularly with terminally ill patients and their families. How do workers in the various hospice disciplines rate their job satisfaction? Researchers at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine evaluated 8,495 staff members from 177 participating hospices in 41 states. They used the Survey of Team Attitudes and Relationships (STAR) with these results:
The mean score was 28 on a 0-100 scale. Hospice-level scores ranged from 15 to 44 with 44 being the highest level of satisfaction. The following are categories and scores:
Physicians -- 42
Chaplains -- 30
Nurses' Aides – 29
Nonclinical staff and clinical staff -- 28
Bereavement Coordinators -- 27
Nurses -- 26
Social Workers -- 25
This research concluded that variations in job satisfaction among hospices and disciplines are significant. Do these results surprise you, or did you expect them to be similar?
In this video, Dr. Martha Twaddle, Chief Medical Officer of Midwest Palliative & Hospice CareCenter, explains the role of the hospice interdisciplinary team.
Frances Shani Parker, Author
Becoming Dead Right: A Hospice Volunteer
in Urban Nursing Homes is available in paperback and e-book
editions in America and other countries at online and offline booksellers.
Wow! I think this past year has been extremely stressful for hospices, but these scores seem surprisingly low to me.
ReplyDeleteThanks for responding, Beth. This research was published two years ago. I was particularly interested in the variations in satisfaction among the various hospice disciplines.
ReplyDelete