Compensation and retention of workers: the case of health workers in public hospitals in Dar es Salaam

The main objective of this research was to investigate whether compensation has a positive relationship with retention problem of health workers in Tanzania. The public health facilities in Dar es Salaam were taken as the case study of the research to represent the whole. Data collection was done through administering of questionnaires which had items with 5 points scale to different health workers, reading various documents related to the study and interviewing key resource persons from the ministry of health and social welfare. The research findings revealed that, overall, the majority of health workers feel that they are inadequately remunerated in terms of benefits and incentives and would therefore not hesitate to shift to greener pastures given opportunity. Since most workers are not satisfied with the overall working conditions in their respective fields, they would not recommend their sons or daughters to follow in their footsteps by pursing careers in the health sector. This may have a negative impact on the number of future aspirants hence lead to future shortage of health workers further compounding the retention problems currently experienced.