Supplemental Versus Permanent Nursing Staffing in Relation to Organizational Commitment

Abstract
Background: Nurse Shortages remain of concern because inadequate nurse staffing has been linked to poor quality of care and adverse patient outcomes. During periods of nursing shortage, hospital managers use nurses from temporary em-ployment agencies to fill vacancies and to meet staffing needs. Supplemental nurses are hired with the expectation of main-taining planned staffing levels when scheduled staff is una-vailable or the patient census fluctuates Supplemental registered nurses are similar to permanent RNs on numerous character-istics including education and experience. Because nurses are the main sources for continued success and performance for organization, building organizational commitment is undoubt-edly very important for all organizations.
Aim: The current study conducted to compare supplemental versus permanent nursing staffing in relation to organizational commitment.
Subjects and Methods: A descriptive comparative design was utilized for this study to achieve the stated aim. The study was conducted at New Kaser El-Aini Teaching Hospital and El-Manial University Hospital. A sample of 301 convenient nurses was invited to participate in the questionnaire. For the purpose of this study, questionnaire for nurses was developed and utilized that consist of two parts: The first part was related to the nurse personal characteristics, the second part assess the nurses commitment level.
Results: The study showed that there was no statistical significance difference among permanent and temporary nurses regarding commitment level as general. The total means of temporary nurse's commitment is moderate (54%). While total mean score of permanent nurse's commitment is moderate (57%).
Conclusion: The study concluded that there was no sta-tistical significant difference among permanent and temporary nurses regarding commitment level as supplemental and permanent staffing has moderate level of organizational commitment and the difference among two groups only re-garding affective commitment.
Recommendations: The current study recommended that Nursing administrators should gradually increasing the pay and absorbing the temporary employees to permanent employ-ment whenever suitable, should provide temporary nurses with job trainings to equip them with skills so that they could be more productive.