Abstract:
Vacancy of nursing positions is a critical problem especially in government hospitals. Difficulties in recruiting and training new nurses may require new measures to solve such a problem in the short run. The overtime payment policy has been utilized to encourage existing nurses to work more hours. This study is to analyse the factors determining the overtime labor supply of staff nurses : a case study in Ramathibodi Hospital. Each nurse is assumed to make 2 choices : (1) whether to work overtime or not, then (2) given working overtime, whether to work in Ramathibodi Hospital or not. The study uses the binary conditional logit model to estimate the probability of those decisions. Out of total population of 650, 551 of current staff nurses in Ramathibodi Hospital returned completed questionaires. The results of the study indicate that the wage rate has a significantly positive effect on the probability of working overtime and the elasticity is 1.38. Whereas the wage rate does not significantly affect the probability of working overtime in Ramathibodi Hospital. In the first decision, factors that have a significantly positive effect are a burden of buying dwellings, supporting their relatives and low households income. Factors that have negative effect are age, marital status, nurses having young children under 3 years old and working in departments of Pediatrics, Medicine, Surgery and Obstetrics. The factor that has a significantly positive effect to the probability to choose to work overtime in Ramathibodi Hospital is age. The significantly negative effects are salary and a burden of buying dwellings. This study also tests the responsiveness of the probability to choose to work overtime to changes in wage rate. It is found that an increment in wage rate cannot be a sole instrument to solve the current problem. Thus, together with wage policy, optimum time management and other facilities such as daycare nursery are recommended.