WORK LIFE BALANCE AND JOB SATISFACTION

The health care sector employs workforce which includes doctors, nurses as well as other health care practitioners across related fields. Essentially, nurses and doctors are the major practitioners in the healthcare system and has the most direct contact with patients. Therefore, these employees (nurses and doctors) are a major determinant of the overall hospital care quality and patient outcomes. They must be provided with anideal professional practice environment where their job satisfaction is guaranteed in order to provide standard care (de Francisco, Meguid & Campbell, 2015). Job satisfaction has been identified as a major determinant of good staff retention in the health care workforce(Wang, Tao, Ellenbecker, & Liu, 2012). Employee welfare and satisfaction are critical in achieving the organizational mission and vision in an ideal setting. Nurses, for example, are the safety net, always present with their patients at the bedside, caring for and detecting medication errors, and addressing patients' true needs. In any healthcare facility, nurses are the first point of contact forpatients. Job satisfaction in the nursing workforce is therefore critical to providingqualitycare (Abualrub, El-Jardali, Jamal, and Al Rub, 2015; Alenius, Tishelman, Runesdotter, and Lindqvist, 2013; Saleh, Darawad, and AlHussami, 2015). Thus, job satisfaction is the most important aspect of nurses' lives (likewise other healthcare practitioners), as it has a positive impact on their morale, productivity, quality of care, patient safety, and retention(Ezeonwu, 2011; Aiken, et al., 2012).