Attrition of Knowledge Workforce in Healthcare in Northern Parts of India – Health Information Technology As a Plausible Retention Strategy

Faced with a global shortage of skilled health workers due to attrition, countries are struggling to build and maintain an optimum knowledge workforce in healthcare for delivering quality healthcare services. Forces that affect healthcare professional turnover needs to be addressed before a competent uniformly adoptable strategy could be proposed for mitigating the problem. In this study we investigate the effect of the socio -demographic characteristics on attrition of healthcare knowledge workforce in northern parts of India that have a wide gradient of rural and urban belt, taking into account both public and private healthcare organizations.The data for the study has been obtained from the Healthcare-professional Attrition Tracking Survey (HATS). Out of 2000 healthcare professionals approached for the survey, 40% of the respondents were able to participate in the study. Structured questionnaires were utilized as the data collection tools. Both public and private healthcare organizations in urban and rural areas were covered for the survey.Data was analysed by means of Factor Analysis on Rotated Factor Matrix using Principal Components Analysis (PCA) in SPSS 16.0 package to determine relationships between factors influencing attrition. Six factors of attrition namely Compensation and perks, Work Life Balance, Sense of Accomplishment, Work load leading to exhaustion, Need for automation and technology improvement, Break Monotony of Work have been identified with a data reliability of 0.809%. Based on the survey response and further analysis, simplification of work processes using Healthcare Information Technology (HIT) tools to reduce time, stress, complexity at work, increase core competency, quality and job satisfaction has been identified as a plausible retention strategy for reducing attrition.