Abstract
A questionnaire survey of public general hospitals was conducted to determine how the nursing assistants working at those hospitals are treated (number of responses:499 hospitals;response rate: 51.4%). Due to various problems, including increasing employment costs and limitation in the number of full-time employees, regardless of the increasing demand for labor at hospitals, the mean percentages of full-time employees, part-time employees, temporary workers, and vendor and contingent workers at the responder hospitals were 14.3%, 45.6%, 37.5%, and 2.7%, respectively. The work hours of temporary employees were the same as those of full-time employees at 74.9% of the hospitals, indicating that many of the responder hospitals use a large number of temporary workers who have no limitations on work hours, without setting a duty-free period between contracts. Regarding the basic pay table for full-time employees, 34.4% of the hospitals use the basic pay table for laborers set by the National Personnel Authority, followed by 29.3% of the hospitals which create their own. As for pay raise, 50.8% of the hospitals have no pay raise system, and the monthly pay of the employees does not change at 96.7% of the hospitals, even after the hospitals start receiving surcharges for having an acceptable acute-phase nursing assistant system. Furthermore, statistically significant differences were observed in several items among different management styles and locations of the hospitals, including in those related to the position of nursing assistant.
