Internal marketing in selected South African public hospitals: a staff satisfaction survey

Abstract

Public hospitals in South Africa usually experience periods of stress owing to understaffing, management and leadership failures, for example, a lack of effective leadership and management capacity exists; hospital managers are disempowered and frustrated by growing centralised control at provincial level; doctors and nurses depart for more lucrative positions within the private sector; while there has been a significant reduction of posts for support workers. Some of these problems and obstacles reflect inappropriate employee management techniques. Within these circumstances, the role of internal marketing, amongst others, is to treat fellow employees as customers and to work towards harmonious internal working relationships between departments, which may be applied to public hospitals in South Africa as means to deliver highly qualitative services. The main objective of this study is to evaluate expressed levels of staff satisfaction regarding specific internal marketing characteristics at two public hospitals within two South African provinces. A total of 542 staff members were randomly selected at two provincial hospitals, namely in Gauteng and the Western Cape. Personal interviews were conducted, which revealed that staff members are fairly highly committed to their jobs. However, it appears that issues such as staff’s willingness to listen to colleagues’ opinions and the extent, to which staff are made aware of the importance of harmonious internal customer relationships between departments, require intervention by management in order to improve output quality.