| dc.description.abstract | Background: Team work is where two or more people come and work together with a shared purpose of achieving a common goal. Team work among health workers is critical for effective implementation of disease control interventions. Activities such as laboratory testing, diagnosis, counseling, and prescription of medicines, health education and maintenance all require different personnel with specific skills. Failure to enforce an effective team in health care, Healthcare service delivery will continue to decline.
Methodology: In this health center, a cross sectional study composed of 36 respondents was done. The respondents composed of both medical and support staff. We used both convenient and quota sampling techniques. Under convenience sampling, the researcher only considered the respondent who was
accessible at the time of the study when a specific health facility was visited.
Data collection was done using standard questionnaires to health workers and support staff. Pre-testing of the tools was done before the actual data collection started and analysis was performed using SPSS version 16.
Main findings:
1. Social- economic factors influencing team work.
Social-economic factors such as age (p=0.003) and level of education (p=0.004*) were found to have a statistically significant association (p<0.05) with working as a team among the health workers. Other social-economic factors such as age, marital status, religion and the average monthly income did not show a statistically significant association (p>0.05) with working as a team among the health workers. 4.4.2 The individual factors influencing teamwork among health workers.
2. Proportion of health workers involved in teamwork.
Majority of the respondent, 31 (86%) reported to be involved in team work by working as a team in the course of their duties while 5 (14%) reported not to do so.
3. Knowledge of health workers on team work.
Majority of the respondents, 34 (94.4%) had adequate knowledge on team while only 2 (5.6%) had average knowledge.
4. Organizational factors influencing team work among health workers
Organizational factors such as duration of work that a given health worker has worked at the health facility (p=0.006*), the work load at the health facility (p=0.002*), the remuneration scale (p=0.012) and the motivation of health workers to practice team work at the health facility (p=0.007) were found to
have a statistically significant association with team work among the health workers. Other organizational factors such as existence of human resource policies on team work, supervisors encouraging team work, motivation of staff, level of coordination, level of communication and decision making approach at the health facility did not show a statistically significant association (p>0.05) with team work among health workers. | en_US |
