Job Satisfaction of Emergency Ambulance Personnel in Northern Cyprus

Perception and evaluation of the environment, communication, comfort, and adaptation to conditions affect individual success in the workplace. Wages and working hours, type of contract (shift work, overtime), security, administration, and relations with co-workers are examples of these conditions. For having high job satisfaction, it is also essential that the staff has sufficient knowledge about the job and their expectations. Job satisfaction can be positively affected by determining job, working time, and eliminating differences of work conditions to emergency health care personnel, especially paramedics.

Emergency health services are not a separate unit in the ministry of health in Northern Cyprus. Since the emergency health services are not directly different from the existing system, and therefore, the staff directly connect to their units, some of the participants work in health centers. The first recruitment as a paramedic in Northern Cyprus in the Ministry of Health took place in 2005. However, Paramedics and EMTs who participated in our study declared that they work under the name of nurse staff. Paramedics, who previously worked under the name of another status, first started to work in the public sector in their occupation group as of 2018. Therefore, the current statistical information of both the ministry of health and the most crowded public hospital in Northern Cyprus does not provide sufficient up-to-date information on the number of paramedics and EMTs.

This descriptive study was conducted to evaluate job satisfaction of nurses, paramedics, and EMTs working in Northern Cyprus emergency health care. A total of 17 healthcare facilities providing emergency care services were in the study. Of these facilities, 2 are emergency call centers, 4 are hospital emergency services, and the rest of connected to health centers. A total of one head nurse, 123 nurses, 12 paramedics, and 3 EMTs provide emergency health care to all of Northern Cyprus.

The data of the study collected between October 20; November 10, 2016, after obtaining permission from the related institutions. The questionnaire consisted of two parts with sociodemographic characteristics and job satisfaction scale. The job satisfaction scale developed by Güneri, İlhan& Avcı was a 5-point Likert type. It consisted of 7 sub-dimensions: the nature of work, relations with co-workers, vocational training, relationships with supervisors, economic, cultural, social aspect, and capacity of consumables.

The answers to suggestions in the scale were scored as "very satisfied = 5 points", "satisfied = 4 points", "okay= 3 points", "dissatisfied = 2 points", and "very dissatisfied = 1 point". The scale lowest score was 47, and the highest was 235. Participants' high scores on the scale indicated high job satisfaction. In this study, the Cronbach alpha coefficient was found to be 0.94 in the scale and 0.79-0.95 in the sub-dimensions.