Role of Career Advancement Practices on The Retention of Employees in Public Health Institutions in Machakos County, Kenya Kinyili Jacinta Munyiva1 1Doctor, Department of Business Administration in the School of Business and Economics, Machakos University, Kenya Abstract In a globalized environment, attraction and retention of high prospective employees is a huge challenge to organizations especially in times of high turnover rates. In many instances even engaged employees are sometimes dissatisfied with the human resource management practices in place which may lead them to look elsewhere. The aim of this study was to explore the role of remuneration practices on the retention of health care staff in public health care institutions in Machakos county in Kenya. The study adopted a mixed research design and targeted all the 772 health care staff in the 156 public health facilities in the eight sub-counties in the county which consists of one level five hospital, four level four hospitals while the rest are health centers and dispensaries. The population was stratified into 8 main strata consisting of doctors, dentists, clinical officers, nurses, physiotherapists, pharmacists, laboratory technicians and radiographers. Stratified random and purposive sampling was used to select a total of 263 respondents from the various strata identified. Simple random sampling was used to select the medical doctors, clinical officers, nurses and laboratory technicians while convenience and purposive sampling, nonprobability methods were used to identify the dentists, pharmacists radiographers, physiotherapists and orthopedic technologists. Interviews were used to collect data from the officers in charge of sub county facilities and the four hospitals while self-administered questionnaires were used on the rest of the respondents. Data was analysed with the help of the SPSS programme. Positive responses were received from 227 respondents out of the sampled 251 giving a 90% response rate. The findings were that there was weak but statistically significant positive relationships between career advancement practices and retention (r=0.245, p<0.05). These findings thus suggest that there is need for the Machakos county government to look into the issues of career advancement and put in place mechanisms that would address these issues and thus minimize their negative effects on staff satisfaction and commitment hence retention in the health care institutions in the county. Top Keywords retention, career advancement, health care institutions, Machakos county, Kenya. Top |