Amid a shortage of nurses, which itself a grave social issue, the number of nurses resigning a few years after their graduation from nursing college is increasing rapidly at our hospital. It is extremely difficult to retain them on a permanent basis. We suspected that their attitude toward their tasks is behind this phenomenon. With this in mind, we have performed a survey on the degree to which nurses at our hospital are satisfied with their own tasks and on whether the degree differs, depending on the year of their experience.
This survey covered the nurses three and 10 years after graduation, using a questionnaire prepared by Moriwaki et al. on degrees of satisfaction.
The results showed that there is little difference in satisfaction between the two groups. The degrees of satisfaction with “human relations” and “perceptions on life and nursing” were high, whereas those with “working conditions” were lowest. The future task is to realize a workplace where nurses could find it worthwhile to work, while striving further to team up with people in other lines of work, and to take another look at nursing and working conditions. There is also the need for each nurse as a specialist to enhance their own sense of independency.