Shared Governance on Intention to Leave and Job Satisfaction of Nurses

Raymond P. Lintag, RN, PhD

In recent years, nursing profession earned an augmenting influence in all the attributes of healthcare industry. It is fundamental that every nurse needs to promote and enhance leadership competence at an early stage of their career. Exhibiting an effective leadership and management, nurses shall be in a dynamic position to contribute in the advancement of the other staff members and enabling the improvement as competent practitioners.

Empowering nurses through the philosophy and structure of nursing professional practice models encompassing shared governance has been considered to be potentially useful to retain nurses, satisfy work experience, and continuously improve the patient care outcomes. Nurse leaders need to exert more of their selves to build workplace that establishes the physical-mental and well-being of nurses. Selecting the appropriate kind of leader is critical to this process. Nurses should have the capacity to work within hospital in which everybody is being considered to respect and acknowledge for their big contribution to patient-centered care. A competent leader is one of the durable and powerful instruments for enhancing nurse retention. Especially nurse leaders, they are in a point to be the transformative agents for having and making hospitals where nurses desire to stay.

Shared governance can be viewed as both guideline and approach that let the nurses have their voices in the decision-making measures. Rather than giving all the accountabilities on one nurse, it is being shared to each group member. Shared governance has been practiced on healthcare facilities, prominently with nursing service. Nurses take responsibility for their behaviors, engage in the decision-making process, investigate and analyze related issues, they consider differences with each point of view, and are active members in the management of the hospital. Nurses have a challenging career, having days caring for patients while working in long hours with lacking staffs. Being part of the service for many years and reaching the stage of burnout, many nurses are now unsure if they should have entered into this nursing profession. In the aspect of huge attrition, healthcare leaders are still thinking on ways to escalate the work satisfaction of the nurses and retention. To facilitate prevention of attrition and ameliorate retention, hospital management should distinguish determinants that may decrease job satisfaction and the correlation with work satisfaction and nurse intent to leave. Nurses turnover rate has a negative impact on the capacity to come up with patient needs and promote excellent care, which might be developing more stress to other nurses because of added workloads. This may affect some changes or alter in work performance towards to their duties leading in decreased work satisfaction, reduced productivity, and leaving the organization. Intention to leave the organization especially nursing profession has turned into a workforce problem and an immense challenge to nursing service administration nowadays in the health industry. Ongoing manpower fluctuation in locally and internationally is raising questions on the antecedent of nurses’ turnover on the satisfaction of the nurse, quality patient care, and system costs.

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The author is Nurse at Jose B. Lingad Memorial General Hospital