Abstract:
Background: Outsourcing is the transfer of ownership, administration, and management of certain activities to external suppliers. Hospital Outsourcing researches are nearly absent in Ethiopia. So, determining employees favorable and unfavorable experiences towards outsourcing can provide insight.
Objective: To determine the benefits of outsourcing of non-clinical services among employees in public Hospitals in Bahir Dar city.
Method: Triangulation convergent parallel mixed design was used. The specific study designs were cross sectional and phenomenological study design for quantitative and qualitative study respectively. For quantitative part data were gathered from 405 employees who were selected using a systematic random sampling by self-administered questioners and data were entered into Epidata and transferred to SPSS for analysis. Qualitative data were collected from purposively selected 10 hospital experts using key informant interview techniques and sample size was determined based on data saturation point. Thematic analysis was done by using ATLAS ti.
Results: Participants (60.2%) were agreed on the benefits of outsourcing and multiple logistic analyses found a significant relationship between their overall agreement with work experiences (AOR: 0.218, 95%CI :( 0.086-0.544)), level of education (AOR: 0.218, 95%CI :( 0.086-0.544)) incompetent providers (AOR: 1.767, 95%CI: (1.168-2,674). The benefits of outsourcing were explored on cost, time and core competence and the explored challenges of outsourcing were on, suppliers, outsourced staffs, controlling and follow up issues.
Conclusion: Most employees rated the attained outsourcing benefits as good. Overall views towards outsourcing benefits were negatively affected by employees with less work experience, being diploma and less level of education and also with the presence of incompetent suppliers. The most explored benefits of outsourcing were cost and time saving and to focus on core competencies and the most faced challenges explored were gaps on suppliers, poor handling of outsourced staffs and poor controlling and follow up mechanisms by hospitals.
Recommendation; it is better to monitor and evaluate the outsourcing activities in regular basis and labor law should be clear and inclusive for outsourced staffs.
Key words: Outsourcing benefits, employees, triangulation convergent parallel mixed design