Laboratory employees' perception about their workload and working environment in governmental primary health care medical laboratories-Gaza Strip (Palestine).

ABSTRACT

Background: Primary health care medical laboratories play a vital role in providing a high quality service to meet needs of the clients, community and health staff. To ensure a high quality of laboratory service it should be well managed in term of human and physical recourses. Aims & Objective: To determine employees’ perception about their workload and working environment. Material and Methods: A cross sectional study was carried out on the governmental primary health care medical laboratories in the Gaze Strip. Data had been collected using a self-administered employee questionnaire to get information about employees’ perception, and an observational checklist to get information about staff distribution and their working environment. Results: The research findings indicate that, PHC laboratories employees’ knowledge about the definition of workload and its measurement tends to be low. According to the findings, 66% of employees believed that over-workload exists in PHC laboratories and they attribute their feeling of being overloaded to factors such as inadequacy of staff, increasing work intensity, increasing paperwork, frequent equipment failure and absence of clear job descriptions. Regarding staffing decisions, 45% of employees have negative perceptions regarding staffing decisions in the sense of being fair, transparent and objective. Also, about 45% of the employees have a negative perception about their working environment which may be attributed to improper working conditions such as unavailability of sufficient working area. In addition, 55% of employees were dissatisfied of the service provided by maintenance department since 50% of the laboratories have at least one disrupted instrument. Conclusion: More involvement of the laboratory staff in decision making and improvement of both working environment and management of laboratory instruments were recommended. Moreover, the need for developing a reliable workload measurement system was recommended for better staffing decisions.