Prioritizing Motivational and Satisfactorily Factors of Volunteer Medical and Health Personnel in Natural Disasters

Currently, volunteer forces are among the main members of the healthcare services, particularly in the treatment sector, and play a key role in healthcare and treatment services. Since efficient human resources are the greatest and most important assets of all organizations, they constantly work to train, retain, and get the best of these valuable assets. The main objective of this work was to prioritize the motivational factors and satisfaction of the volunteer forces participating in treatment and health programs in the case of emergencies.
The study population of this research was all volunteers (N=600) in treatment and health programs of Kerman Province. Using the Morgan Table, 360 subjects were selected. The data-gathering instrument was Andam’s questionnaire of motivational factors with reliability of 0.94, and Galindo-Kuhn and Guzley (2001) questionnaire of satisfaction with reliability of 0.92. To determine research data distribution, Kolmogorov-Smirnov test was applied. Moreover, for data analysis inferential statistics tests of Friedman, Mann–Whitney U, and Kruskal–Wallis were used at significance level of P The present research revealed that the most and least important motivational factors in volunteers of treatment and health units were purposeful motivation and financial motivation with average rankings of 5.45 and 1.99, respectively. In addition, among the satisfaction factors, the volunteers reported communication with volunteers and organizational communication as the most and least important satisfaction factors, respectively.
The results of this research indicated that the female volunteers participated in volunteer activities with greater occupational, support, progress, and social motivations. In addition, single participants had greater occupational, social, and financial motivations towards participation in these activities as compared to married participants.
The results of this research revealed that to absorb a higher number of volunteers in health and treatment organizations, commitment and purposeful aspects must be emphasized on, as by improving the motivational and satisfaction factors, we can expect that satisfaction and retention level increases in volunteers. Furthermore, by knowing the volunteers’ motivations, the managers of the health and treatment organizations can provide their retention and satisfaction and play a key role in crisis management during disasters by exploiting the volunteer services.