Abstract
Shortage of physicians in rural areas was one of main problem in Thailand. Previous studies found
that there were several factors which related to the existence of a doctor in the community hospitals. The
major factor was financial issue. Thai government has launched special incentive money and professional
opportunity strategies to rural doctors since 2008. After these motivated strategies, the recruitment of physician had been rising in community hospitals. The purpose of study was to evaluate the opinion of
general practitioners on incentive money and professional opportunity strategies to the retention of
physicains in community hospitals. This was cross sectional descriptive study of the physicians in the
community hospitals nationwide covering 720 hospitals. Mail questionnaires were distributed and collected
data between 1st to 31st January 2011. Data were analyzed by SPSS-PC version 11.5 by reporting as
descriptive statistics such as frequency, percentage, average, and standard deviation including analytic
statistics with Chi-square and binary logistic regression. The results revealed that response rate was 38.52%.
Most of physicians were male 66.59%; average age was 35.92 years old. A 30 bed-sized community hospital
was the most current work place 52.64. The opinion of responders to incentive money and professional
opportunity strategies revealed that this financial strategy with incentive money related to the retention
of physicians and influenced longer duration of working up to 88.00%. There were 71.15% of physicians
that strongly disagreed to the exception of this incentive money. Moreover, professional opportunity
strategy directly affected physicians with high satisfaction rate 70.95%. This study demonstrated the
financial strategy such incentive money and professional opportunity strategy were the major factors that
related to the retention of physicians in community hospitals. These motivation strategies should be considered
and applied to human resource policy.
