Scoping Review Of Challenges Faced By Female Healthcare Professionals In The Workforce - Assignment Solution

Introduction:

Intro and Global data:

The number of women entering the medical and health care workforce globally has increased in the past several decades (Heron, 2016). In Australia, 79% of women are employed in health care and social assistance workforce (Statistics, 2018), while in the United States (US) 78% of women work in the healthcare sector (Kirchheimer, 2007).Furthermore, many of female participations are employees in different areas in healthcare sectors, such as medicine, nursing and physiotherapy.  In healthcare sectors, such as medicine, nursing and physiotherapy are covered by female participation. For example, in the United Kingdom (UK) more than 90% of the nursing workforce are female (Davey B, 2005; Kirchheimer, 2007), while in Canada it is reported that  40% of physicians are female (Mobilos, Chan, & Brown, 2008) and Australian women make up over one third of Australian medical workforce (Price & Clearihan, 2015).  

Women role:

Women have many roles and positions in healthcare organisations, hospitals and healthcare education settings (Lantz, 2008), and include roles such as doctors, nurses, psychiatrists, and administrators. For example, Petek, Gajsek, and Petek Ster (2016) reported that 65% of doctors in Slovenia are women and the ratio of male to female general practice (GP) is 1:5, while in Latvia rate of female doctors is 74.3% (Feldman, 2018). Treister-Goltzman and Peleg (2016) reported that female’s jobs in hospitals were in frontal emergency lines, particularly laboratories and radiological departments. Recently it was reported that 93% of nursing in US was female working in their right area of workforce {Barrett-Landau, 2014 #23469}.

Intro to challenges they may face:

Despite the increase in the number of women in the general workforce, female workers face many challenges in the workplace generally and especially in health care professionals. These challenges include family responsibilities, poor human recourse policies, and gender inequality that hinder their professional growth (Al ‐ Riyami, 2015; Alilu, 2016; Sells, 1989; Treister-Goltzman, 2016). The increase number of women in the health care field and their challenges has drawn special attention to scholars and researchers.  For example, work-family balance was highlighted as a significant barrier to career advancement in lots of countries as reported by (K. K. Ali, 2014; Alilu, Zamanzadeh, Fooladi, Valizadeh, & Habibzadeh, 2016; Kerr, Armstrong, & Cade, 2016; Sells & Sells, 1989; Treister-Goltzman & Peleg, 2016). According to Tejas Desai (2016) and Hong Lu (2011) women in the health field face challenges related to a poor work environment which include unequal pay, unsatisfactory working conditions, limited opportunities for career advancement, work-related stress, and unfavourable policies that promote patriarchy. Tejas Desai (2016) reported that women earn less than their male counterparts despite having equal production, amount of work, academic qualification, and experience. Female nurses also been reported to deal with unfriendly workplaces that lack opportunities to advance their career, as well as experience work-family balance challenges that hinder their career progress and affect their lifestyle causing stress and excessive tiredness (Mackusick, 2010 ;Younas, 2014; Kerr, 2016). Previous reports by A. Ali, Subhi, Ringsted, and Konge (2015) show that workplace policies disregard women issues through discriminating female workers via promoting practices. In addition to that, they argue that human resource policymakers have not enacted proper policies to address the gender dynamic differences. These differences (linked with the next paragraph)

To our knowledge there is no recent comprehensive literature review studies that have been undertaken to collectively explore the challenges faced by female health care professionals in the world. Therefore, this study will conduct a scoping review to explore the challenges female healthcare professionals face in the workforce.