Motivation of nursing staff in a private care home - Essay Example

There are nursing homes with special care units for people with disorders such as Alzheimers. Nursing homes can be used by anyone who needs a constant care and special nursing needs. The needs for skilled nurses are on the rise and the availability is fairly scarce. Therefore it is necessary to understand the factors affecting the nurse’s motivation and their performance to retain them in service. Administrators of Nursing Homes/Hospitals need to know the critical significance of motivation for the performance of health workers and skilled nurses in the context of this scarce resource.

Motivation at work is extensively supposed to be a key issue in the performance of individuals and organisations and is also an important predictor of intention to give up the workplace (Hasselhorn, et al. 2004). The challenge for the policy-makers and health care executives is to be able to motivate people to join an organization, stay there and carry out their work to a certain standard. It is well-known that worker performance is the outcome of three factors (Bennett and Franco, 1999), which are the as following: Incentive is one way of motivating people to perform.

Linking incentives and performance is important. Incentive may be explained as an unambiguous financial or non-financial reward for performing certain act. The World Health Report defines incentives as all the rewards and punishments that providers face as a result of the organizations in which they work and the exact intervention they give. Those can be constructive or harmful, financial or non-financial, tangible or intangible. Normally incentives comprise pay, bonuses, allowances, vacation, work independence, transportation and flexible working hours.

Incentives are used as a means to favour certain behaviours in order to reached defined goals such as improving performance (Hicks and Adams, 2003). Incentives are important for the reason that they can power the key