Nursing assistants can work without a professional certification to help registered nurses and licensed practical nurses. Nursing assistants engage in various tasks, e.g., washing laundry, cleaning up, and clerk tasks regarding nursing. Enhancing work motivation among nursing assistants is essential for every hospital, because when nursing assistants do their jobs well, it allows registered nurses and licensed practical nurses to complete their own specialized jobs. We examined the predictors significantly associated with nursing assistants' work motivation. For those predictors, we produced items to examine job satisfaction. Those items are classified into intrinsic and extrinsic facets. The subjects for this study were Japanese nursing assistants working in 26 hospitals with 62-376 beds (4 public and 22 private hospitals). A total of 516 nursing assistants were analyzed, with the average age and standard deviation of 42.7 ± 12.9 years; the age of 456 female subjects was 43.8 ± 12.7 years and that of 60 male subjects was 34.3 ± 11.0 years. Our results show that "work motivation" is significantly associated with "free time to do one's own things," "nursing assistants as important partners on the job," "feeling helpful to patients," "participating in decision making," and "job-skill improvement." Free time to do one's own things is an extrinsic item. Hospital administrators must monitor the workload and their quality of life among nursing assistants. All the other significant items are intrinsic. Nursing assistants are not only motivated by money. They highly value the intrinsic nature and experience of their jobs.
In environments in which professional nurses do simple tasks, e.g., laundry, cleaning, and waste disposal, they cannot concentrate on technical jobs by utilizing their expertise to its fullest benefit. Particularly, in Japan, the nursing shortage is a serious problem. If professional nurses take their time to do any of these simple tasks, the tasks should be preferentially allocated to nursing assistants. Because there has been no descriptive study to investigate the amount of time Japanese professional nurses spent doing such simple tasks during their working time, their actual conditions remain unclear. Professional nurses recorded their total working time and the time they spent doing such simple tasks during the week of the survey period. The time an individual respondent spent doing one or more simple tasks during that week was summed up, as was their working time. Subsequently, the percentage of the summed time he or she spent doing any of those tasks in his or her summed working time was calculated. A total of 1,086 respondents in 19 hospitals that had 87 to 376 beds were analyzed (response rate: 53.3%). The average time (SD) that respondents spent doing those simple tasks and their total working time were 2.24 (3.35) hours and 37.48 (10.88) hours, respectively. The average percentage (SD) of the time they spent doing the simple tasks in their working time was 6.00% (8.39). Hospital administrators must decrease this percentage. Proper working environments in which professional nurses can concentrate more on their technical jobs must be created.
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