Background: Intention to stay is defined as employees’ intention to stay in the existing employment relation with their current employer on long-term basis. The health workforce is the backbone of health care systems. Hospitals are facing difficulties to providing a consistent level of quality health care in a fast-changing health environment due to the shortage of experienced health workers which is a critical global issue. A number of health workers were quitting their hospital to continue career in another profession in clinical and non-clinical fields. Factors that cause these problems were not investigated in Ethiopia yet. The study aims to assesses the effects of motivation and job satisfaction on intention stay and how motivation and satisfaction can be improved by hospital health managers in order to increase retention of health workers in Awi Zone PHs from February 15,2021 to March 30, 2021. Methods: Institution based cross-sectional study was conducted on 242 Health workers. Pre-tested structured self-administered questionnaires were used to collect data. Data were entered and cleaned by using Epi-data version 3.1 then exported to IBM SPSS version 26 windows statistical software for analysis. Summary tables and, figures were used for describing data. The association between independent and dependent variables was assessed by using bivariable and multivariable logistic regression model. Factors that had statistically significant association with the dependent variable (P < 0.05) were identified as significant in the multivariable logistic regression analysis. Results: Overall, 41.7% of the respondents reported to have intention to stay. The effects of health workers’ motivation and job satisfaction were significantly associated with intention to stay. The significant associated with intention stay included having bachelor degree (AOR [95% CI] 5.46 [1.71, 17.48]), working in the current health facilities (AOR [95% CI] 3.48 [ 1.21, 10.10]), overall job satisfaction (AOR [95% CI] 2.04 [1.08, 3.88]), work itself (AOR [95% CI] 3.74[1.50, 9.30]) and organizational policy (AOR [95% CI] 2.18[1.04,4.56]). Conclusion: Our findings indicate that effective human resource management practices at public hospital level influence health worker motivation and job satisfaction, thereby increase the likelihood for intention to stay. Therefore, it is worth strengthening human resource management skills at zonal level and supporting zonal health managers to implement retention strategies.