Nursing Performance and Job Satisfaction Among Nurses in a Secondary Hospital in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

A rapid change brought by technology and the complexity of the diseases shaped the healthcare services around the globe. At the frontlines of these changes are nurses and their required expertise and high standard of nursing performance. In the institution where the study was conducted numerous accounts were raised concerning the performances of nurses. An increased rate of safety events concerning medication error, falls rate, several pressure ulcers developed, and needle stick injuries and a significantly high turnover rate among clinical nurses were recorded. This impelled the researcher to explore the relationship between nursing performance and job satisfaction among nurses in a secondary hospital in Riyadh Saudi Arabia. A descriptive correlational design was utilized in this study. The six dimensions of the nursing performance (Schwirian, 1978) and nursing workplace satisfaction tool (Fairbrother et al., 2010) was used to gather the information from n=168 respondents who completed the survey. Data analysis were conducted using SPSS, Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, version 22.0. Descriptive statistics such as percentages, frequencies, means, and standard deviations was utilized describing participants’ demographic data. Pearson-moment correlation and Chi-square were used to test the relationships between study variables. Generally, nurses in a secondary hospital in Riyadh Saudi Arabia have higher nursing performance and job satisfaction. This is evident by the high scores in each of the tested subscales of nursing performance (leadership, critical care, teaching/collaboration, interrelation/communications, planning and evaluation, and professional development) and domains of job satisfaction (intrinsic, extrinsic, and relational). The perceived relationship of nursing performance and the sociodemographic and the perceived job satisfaction and sociodemographic showed no relationship. However, sex or gender has a positive relationship with the relational factor of job satisfaction. There is evidence to conclude that there is no statistically significant correlation between overall job satisfaction and leadership (.059) p value=.445, critical care (.059) p value=.447, teaching (.044) p value= .573, planning & evaluation (070) p value= .367 and communications (.106) p value= .173 of nurses. However, there is sufficient evidence to conclude that there is a statistically significant correlation between overall job satisfaction and professional development (.208) p=.007.