Background: General satisfaction is a personal experience and sources of satisfaction or dissatisfaction vary between professional groups. General satisfaction is usually related with work settings, work performance and mental health status.
Aim: The purpose of this research study was to investigate the level of general satisfaction of health care workers and to examine whether there were any differences among employees of medical and mental health sector.
Methods: The sample consisted of employees from the medical and mental health sector, who were all randomly selected. A two-part questionnaire was used to collect data. The first section involved demographic information and the second part was a General Satisfaction Questionnaire (GSQ). The statistical analysis of data was performed using the software package 19.0 for Windows. Descriptive statistics were initially generated for sample characteristics. All data exhibited normal distributions and thus the parametric t-test was used to compare mean scores between the two health sectors. P values < 0.05 were defined as reflecting the acceptable level of statistical significance.
Results: 457 healthcare workers completed the questionnaire. The mean age of the sample was 41.8 ± 7.9 years. The Cronbach alpha coefficient for GSQ was 0.79. The total mean score of general satisfaction for the employees in medical sector was 4.5 (5=very satisfied) and for the employees in mental health sector is 4.8. T-test showed that these results are statistical different (t=4.55, p<0.01) and therefore the two groups of healthcare workers feel different general satisfaction.
Conclusions: Mental health employees appear to experience higher levels of general satisfaction and mainly they experience higher satisfaction from family roles, life and sexual life, emotional state and relations with patients.
Keywords: General satisfaction; healthcare professionals; job satisfaction; life satisfaction; medical healthcare workers; mental healthcare workers.