Relationship between professional motivations and the expectation of staying at the same workplace: A cross-sectional descriptive study with physicians in Portugal
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abstract
There is a global trend related to the migration of health professionals, particularly physicians, to the
most densely populated areas. In Portugal, the unequal distribution of medical professionals is
justified by the fact that in the most favoured areas, there are more career opportunities, better
infrastructures and equipment, better working conditions and supervision, more and better social
facilities and better salary. The aim of this work was to identify professional reasons associated with
the expectation of staying at the same workplace. It was selected a simple random sample of 594
physicians out of a total of 18,711 registered physicians in Northern Regional Section of the Order of
Physicians (NRSOP), Portugal Most physicians would like to stay at the same workplace due to: the prospect of training and
working at the current location, the organizational level of the unit, the level of differentiation of the
hospital/health centre, the availability to use the state-of-the-art medical and surgical technology,
better rewards, the level of work differentiation in the unit/service, the possibility of reconciling
public and private practice, good references of the current unit/working group, avoid unit/workgroup
with bad references and the prospect of career progression.
This study revealed that, for physicians, professional motivations/purposes have an influence on the
expectations of staying or not at the same workplace. Therefore, the study recommends that policy
makers should prioritize professional reasons when formulating and implementing measures to
promote the fixing of medical professionals in order to achieve greater equity in access to health care.
