iPhysicians’ and Nurses’ Perceptions of the Privatization of Health Care Services

Introduction and Aim: Privatization is generally defined as the limitation, reduction or elimination of the government's economic activities and functions. The purpose of this study is to determine physicians' and nurses' general perceptions of how privatizations in the public sector and health field affect their professional practices. Materials and Methods: Nurses and physicians (n = 870) working in Sivas Cumhuriyet University Hospital comprised the target population of this descriptive cross-sectional study. Of them, 220 participated in the study. Data were collected from October 20, 2014 to November 5, 2014. Data was collected using the sociodemographic characteristics questionnaire (ya da "personal information form") and Nurses' Privatization Perception Scale (NPPS) developed by Harmanc? Seren and Y?ld?r?m. The validity and reliability study of the NPPS was also performed by the same authors. The scale consists of 37 questions and 3 subscales. The lower the scores obtained from the scale are the more negative nurses' perceptions of privatization are. To analyze the data, the SPSS 14 program, percentages, t test, Mann-Whitney U test, One Way ANOVA and Kruskal -Wallis tests were used. Results: The mean age of the participants (n=220) was 34.72 (SD = 8.02). Of them, 68.6% were nurses, 31.4% were physicians, 69.5% were female, 61.8% were married, 51.8% were bachelor's degree graduates, 69.5% were members of a professional organization, 83.2% were permanent employees and 44.5% had a length of service less than 10 years. While the mean total score all the participants obtained from the scale was X = 88.43 +- 29.05, it was X = 98.42 +- 31.97 for the physicians and X = 83.87 +- 26.50 for the nurses (p