Intentions to Stay in Rural Healthcare Providers: Implications for Social Work Education

Overview: This presentation will impart educational implications based on research examining individual, workplace, and organizational correlates of retention intentions in rural healthcare providers. Providing these findings may highlight educational content that could promote a sustainable rural healthcare social work workforce to ensure the health rights of medically underserved place-bound populations.Proposal text: Background/Rationale: Rural healthcare providers, including social workers, provide critical services to medically underserved place-bound populations. However, little is known about factors that promote or impede rural healthcare providers’ intentions to stay with their organizations. An intention to stay is a conscious and deliberate willingness to remain with the organization (Eom, 2015; Tett & Meyer, 1993). Strong intentions to stay may incline providers to sustained organizational practice, thus enhancing organizational, and population- and community-based knowledge. This presentation shares a study examining perceptions of individual, workplace, and organizational factors associated with intention to stay in rural healthcare providers. The findings will be used as a basis for educational implications that will prepare professionals for sustained practice in these organizations.

Methods: Healthcare providers were recruited from two agencies in a rural county in a northeastern state from 2019-2021. To be inclusive of the provider landscape, a provider was defined as any staff who delivered a physical, mental, or behavioral health service, professional or para-professional. A cross-sectional survey was voluntarily completed by 88 providers. The majority of participants were white (85.1%), non-Hispanic (89.5%) women (85.1%). The largest proportion were nurses (42.0%). Measures used in the study were the Intention to Stay Scale (Eom, 2015; α=.926), the Workplace Attachment Scale (Rioux, 2011; α=.864), the Job Satisfaction Survey, Nature of Work subscale (Spector, 1985; α=.763), the Organizational Citizenship Behavior Scale, Helping Behavior subscale (Le Roy & Rioux, 2012; Podsakoff et al., 1990; α=.723), the Index of Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Reflection on Process subscale (Bronstein, 2002; α=.744), and the Organizational Commitment Questionnaire (Mowday et al., 1979; α=.926). Ordinary least squares multiple regression was used to develop a statistically significant model of participants’ intentions to stay.

Results: On average, participants reported moderately-high intentions to stay. Intention to stay was correlated with perceptions of job satisfaction with the nature of the work (r=.312, p=.004), organizational commitment (r=.644, p