The first national study on the satisfaction and retention of healthcare professionals within Portugal’s National Health Service (SNS) and the private sector for the year 2024 has been conducted.
The study was carried out by the Center for Policy Planning and Evaluation (Planapp) in collaboration with the Institute of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa.
“Overall, the study results indicate that the general satisfaction of healthcare professionals—doctors and nurses—with their profession is reasonably high, and perhaps even higher than expected,” notes Planapp.
The average scores, on a scale from 0 to 5, reveal greater satisfaction among doctors in the private sector (3.69) compared to the SNS (3.26), while nurses show slightly higher satisfaction levels in the SNS (3.29) than in the private sector (3.19).
The authors caution against direct comparisons between the results of the two sectors, as the samples differ: representative for the SNS and convenience-based for the private sector.
In the SNS, the study shows that doctors and nurses have moderate overall satisfaction levels with “clear signs of dissatisfaction, especially pertaining to wages.”
According to the study, supported by the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR), “factors such as working conditions, relationships within teams, and access to technological resources significantly impact professionals’ satisfaction.”
“Generally, satisfaction increases as professionals take on leadership roles, are older, have fixed hours, and work exclusively within the SNS,” a trend also observed in the private sector.
The study also notes that hospital professionals are more dissatisfied compared to those working in primary healthcare.
Regionally, dissatisfaction is most pronounced in the Algarve and Lisbon and Tagus Valley regions, while the highest satisfaction is recorded in the Alentejo region.
For nurses, specific reasons for satisfaction and dissatisfaction vary across regions, though the North sees the highest dissatisfaction levels, with a “clear link between dissatisfaction and extreme exhaustion (‘burnout’)” noted in both sectors.
In both sectors, burnout is more prevalent among younger professionals, those with multiple jobs, rotating shifts, and high family responsibilities.
“There are shared reasons for doctors and nurses to justify their intent to stay in their current workplace (e.g., salary, among others),” it emphasizes.
In the private sector, satisfaction profiles of healthcare professionals are “more homogeneous than those detected in the SNS,” states the study.
Regarding retention, the findings reveal that generally, healthcare professionals in the SNS tend to remain at their current workplace.
For doctors, this intent is lower among interns (2.80) compared to specialists (3.59).
Among nurses, the intent is lower for those with specializations not exercising specialist roles (3.23) and higher for nurse managers (4.02).
Doctors in the private sector clearly express an intention to stay at their workplace (4.09), while nurses also show a tendency to remain (3.13).
