Identifying Occupational and Non-Occupational Factors Affecting the Retention of Health Care Employees in the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Systematic Review Study

Background and Aim: Increasing the retention of health care workers in the context of Covid-19 expansion is one of the most important challenges for the health care systems. To design a strategy to maintain health care workers, it is necessary to identify the factors influencing willingness to work or leave the job among health care workers. This study aimed to identify the factors affecting the willingness to work or leave the job among health care workers during the Covid-19 pandemic. Methods: To identify relevant publications, the online Databases including Scopus, PubMed, Web of Science, and ProQuest were searched on October 20, 2020. Based on the inclusion criteria, only studies that investigated the factors influencing willingness to work or motivation to leave the job among health care workers during the Covid-19 pandemic were included. Results: Of the 610 studies found through searching, after deleting similar and unrelated studies, a number of 10 cross-sectional articles with a sample size of 15834 subjects were selected. Obtained findings indicated that the willingness to work among health care workers ranged from 61% to 98.7% and averaged 83.5%. The results of studies showed that job factors such as work experience, previous work experience in emergency time or Covid-19, workload, cooperation between employees, the relationship between employees and managers, access to personal protective equipment, and welfare facilities were significantly proportional to the willingness of health care workers to work. Conclusion: The results of this study showed to design a strategy to maintain the health care workers during the Covid-19 pandemic, a broad range of occupational and psychological variables should be considered. Due to the limited number and quality of studies and the extent of influential variables, more studies are needed in this field.