gms | German Medical Science

Background: The maternity care system depends on midwifery workforce. Shortage, turnover and retention of midwives put the quality of care for mothers, babies and their families at risk. In view of this global shortage of midwives, it is becoming increasingly important to detect effective intervention strategies that improve job satisfaction and working environment in midwifery. Midwives’ job satisfaction has been surveyed in very different ways so far and there is no overview of job satisfaction instruments and their quality available.

Aim: The aim of this scoping review is to map and summarize the evidence on the assessment of job satisfaction in hospital midwifery.

Methods: The review follows the PRISMA Extension for Scoping Reviews. A systematic literature search across five databases was undertaken. Out of 582 records 27 empirical research articles were included in this review and the instruments used were analysed according to their reliability and validity.

Results: Over 20 different instruments were used to measure midwives’ job satisfaction with considerable differences in terms of evaluated categories and number of items. They were all self-administered questionnaires. Most of the instruments were multiprofessional instruments or instruments developed for nurses, some of them slightly adapted to midwifery practice. The majority of the instruments showed good reliability for the use with midwives working in hospitals. Major categories of the instruments were identified. The categories ‘work demands and workload’, ‘potential for development’, ‘working relationships’, ‘manager support and policy’, ‘recognition’ and ‘financial reward’ were part of nearly every instrument, items on the dimensions ’meaningfulness’ and ’autonomy’ as well as items on mental and physical disorders were underrepresented. No items could be identified to assess the influence of the birthing room environment for the midwives’ job satisfaction.

Relevance: Job satisfaction is an important factor influencing work performance and personal well-being. This review maps available instruments to measure job satisfaction and identifies domains, that are important to be part of assessment instruments to gain a better understanding of job satisfaction of midwives.

Conclusion: Procedures for assessing job satisfaction on a systematic and widely applied basis should be implemented. Valid tools that cover all domains of the concept job satisfaction in midwifery found in this review are needed. Future research should additionally focus on exploring the influence of birthing room design as part of midwives´ work environment.

Ethics and conflicts of interest: A vote on ethics was not necessary. The research was financed by own resources. There are no conflicts of interest.

The PDF file of the poster submitted for the meeting is available in German as Attachment 1 [Attach. 1].