Most studies in Ethiopia on intention to leave were done among health professional participants in general and among the nurses working in different study settings. This hospital-based cross-sectional study has attempted to determine the magnitude of nurses’ intention to leave a job and identified the factors associated with the intention to leave.
The first study aim was to determine the magnitude of nurses’ intention to leave their jobs and the result revealed that 43.9% of nurses intended to leave. Our finding shows consistency with study results of 46.1% [13], 44.6% [14], 42.5% [15], and 40% [16] in South Africa, Japan, Portugal, and Malaysian nurses’ intention to leave their employment or job respectively. This similarity may be due to the similarity in socioeconomic factors and health policy of most countries with Ethiopia.
The magnitude of nurses’ intention in this study is lower than previous 60.2% [17], and 59.4% among nurses [18] both in Western of Ethiopia, 50.2% at selected health facilities [19], and 50% in south part of Ethiopia [20]. This difference could be due to the variation in the level of the health facilities in the previous studies. The magnitude is also lower than the studies among Ethiopian health professionals 65% [21], 63.7% [22], 61.3% [23], 52.5% [24] and 48.4% [25] in Northwest, Southwest, and in the last three in western parts of Ethiopia respectively. This difference could be due to the difference in study participants of being mixed health professionals in the previous studies. The other reason could be due to difference in the levels of health facilities as study settings in those studies. Moreover, our result is lower than 60.90% in Jordan [26], 61% in South Korea [27] and 49.50% in Turkey [28]. The difference could be due to the difference in nurse participants’ workplace setting, small sample size and the use of one item questionnaires in the other studies.
However, this finding is higher than the 10% [29], and 14% of nurses in the United States intended to leave [30], 16.2% in Japan [31], 22.2% in Australia [32], the two findings 21.9% [33] and 35.5% [34] among Italian nurses intended to leave their current jobs. And higher than 33% of nurses in twelve European countries [35]. It is also higher than the 30.9% in South Africa [36], 24.3% [10] in Saudi Arabia and higher than three study results 22.50% [37], 17.20% [38] and 5.12% of nurses’ intended to leave in China [39]. This high magnitude of intention may due to low payment for Ethiopian nurses [18, 19], nurses lacked remuneration and fringe benefits [17, 40, 41], nurses work without compensation payments for weekends and holidays [42]. It could be also due to the reason nurses had poor interpersonal relationships with hospital managers, lacked respect from the managers, poor supervision and feedback systems. In addition to this, nurses are working in the unfair management system and leadership and with unfair treatment [18, 19, 22] and nurses are getting little support [17, 20, 41], less motivated in their work [22, 43] and less organizational commitment to the contributions they made [18]. Nurses are not involved in policy making, procedures, planning processes, and the nurses’ opinions and suggestions are not part of solutions to the hospitals [20, 40].
The second aim of the study identified the factors associated with nurses’ intention to leave their jobs. Being a male nurse is associated with the intention to leave. This association shows similarity with a study in Ethiopia, male health professionals were more likely than females to leave [23], and in a descriptive study, a higher number of male health professionals intended to leave their jobs [25]. The similarity could be due to the responsibility for males for their families’ income and to get a higher salary in other positions.
The male gender as a predictor is consistent with two study results from Jordan which male nurses were more likely to leave their current position than female nurses [26, 44]. And also it is consistent with the study result from Italy that the male gender was listed as a predictor of intention to leave [34]. This similarity may be due to the similarity in socioeconomic factors of those countries with Ethiopia. However, South Korean female nurses had 2.52 times greater odds of intending to leave the workplace than did male nurses [27].
Moreover, working in the medical ward is a predictor of nurses’ intention to leave their jobs. Other findings are in line with our findings, the majority of nurses moved from general departments of medical and surgical as an actual turnover in Israel [45]. In Singapore, nursing practice environments were identified as one with the strongest predictors of nurses’ intention to leave [46]. In addition, the similarity is seen with a study among nurses working in closed-ward of psychiatric nursing in Israel reported a higher intent to leave [47]. Another from California showed that nurses working in adult non-intensive care units had an increased odds ratio of intention to leave [48]. This similarity may be due to the increment of patients with chronic diseases admission to the medical wards may cause burden on Ethiopian nurses. The burden may influence nurses to have high intention to leave their jobs.