The relationships between personal factors, work motivation, and work expertise of professional nurses in community hospitals, Suphan Buri Province

Abstract

The purposes of this survey research were (1) to study personal factors, work motivation, and work expertise, and (2) to examine relationships of personal factors, work motivation, and work expertise of professional nurses in the community hospitals, Suphan Buri province.  A study population was 620 of professional nurses working in the community hospitals in Suphan Buri province. A sample size of 115 people was drawn by stratified random sampling. A questionnaire, with reliability coefficients of  0.955 and 0.960 for work motivation and work expertise, was used as the study instrument. Data were analyzed by percentage, mean, standard deviation, Chi-square test, and Pearson’s Correlation. The results revealed that (1) professional nurses currently working at the community hospitals in Suphan Buri province were 43.14 years old on average, having been working in the nurse profession for 20.81 years, married, having no advanced degree apart from BNS, having participated in the in-service training courses. Overall work motivation and work expertise were  at the moderate level. (2) The personal factors: age, working experiences, marital status, advanced degree, and additional in-service training courses had no significant relationships to work expertise. Nevertheless, work motivation had a positive relationship to overall work expertise, statistically significant at .001 level.