AUTHOR=Chen Yuquan , You Yanwei , Wang Yiche , Wang Yutong , Dai Tao 

TITLE=Global Insights Into Rural Health Workers' Job Satisfaction: A Scientometric Perspective

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Public Health

VOLUME=Volume 10 - 2022

YEAR=2022

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2022.895659

DOI=10.3389/fpubh.2022.895659

ISSN=2296-2565

ABSTRACT=Introduction: Rural health workers play an irreplaceable role in ensuring and improving the health level of rural residents as the most basic and extensive medical service provider in rural areas. However, rural health institutions are facing significant worker shortages worldwide, not only in low-income and middle-income countries but also in developed countries. As an important variable to explain rural health workers' work status and predict turnover behavior, job satisfaction has received more and more attention currently.

Methods: Publications from January 1,1995 to December 31,2021 were identified from the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-Expanded), the Social Sciences Citation Index(SSCI), and the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) of the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC), CiteSpace, VOSviewer and R software were applied to conduct this study.

Results: A total of 251 publications were obtained from the WoSCC database. The number of publications had a statistically significant increase in the study period. Ranking in top 3 of the most productive countries or regions in this field were the United States, United Kingdom and China. “Health Care Sciences & Services”, “Nursing” and “Public, Environmental & Occupational Health” seemed to be the major subjects. According to the references co-citation analysis, “motivation”, “rural and remote areas”, and “work environment” were 3 noteworthy topics during the development of the research field. Moreover, through the keyword analysis, the underlying relationship among “job satisfaction”, “job burnout”, “turnover intention” were explored.

Conclusions: Publications about job satisfaction associated with rural health workers had remarkably indicated that this research field had great development potential and broad prospects. As an emerging topic related to rural health workers job status, job satisfaction and its related affected factors were systematically summarized by clusters and keywords analysis. We also highlighted that job satisfaction had a negative predictive effect on rural health workers’ job burnout and turnover intention, and job burnout played a positive role in predicting turnover intention. In addition, the job satisfaction and working environment of rural health workers under COVID-19 pandemic should receive more attention in the future.