TY  - JOUR
A1  - Mache, Stefanie
A1  - Vitzthum, Karin
A1  - Nienhaus, Albert
A1  - Klapp, Burghard F.
A1  - Groneberg, Jan David Alexander
T1  - Physicians' working conditions and job satisfaction : does hospital ownership in Germany make a difference?
T2  - BMC health services research
N2  - Background: A growing number of German hospitals have been privatized with the intention of increasing cost effectiveness and improving the quality of health care. Numerous studies investigated what possible qualitative and economic consequences these changes issues might have on patient care. However, little is known about how this privatization trend relates to physicians' working conditions and job satisfaction. It was anticipated that different working conditions would be associated with different types of hospital ownership. To that end, this study's purpose is to compare how physicians, working for both public and privatized hospitals, rate their respective psychosocial working conditions and job satisfaction.
Methods: The study was designed as a cross-sectional comparison using questionnaire data from 203 physicians working at German hospitals of different ownership types (private for-profit, public and private nonprofit).
Results: The present study shows that several aspects of physicians' perceived working conditions differ significantly depending on hospital ownership. However, results also indicated that physicians' job satisfaction does not vary between different types of hospital ownership. Finally, it was demonstrated that job demands and resources are associated with job satisfaction, while type of ownership is not.
Conclusion: This study represents one of a few studies that investigate the effect of hospital ownership on physicians work situation and demonstrated that the type of ownership is a potential factor accounting for differences in working conditions. The findings provide an informative basis to find solutions improving physicians' work at German hospitals.
Y1  - 2012
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/25917
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-259175
SN  - 1472-6963
N1  - © 2009 Mache et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
VL  - 9
IS  - Art. 148
SP  - 1
EP  - 9
PB  - BioMed Central
CY  - London
ER  -