Exploring Health - Related Entrepreneurial Activities Among Nurses And Midwives In The Greater Accra Region

ABSTRACT

Entrepreneurship in nursing and midwifery is not a new concept. It thus offers selfemployment opportunities for nurses and midwives to pursue their passion and improve health outcomes. In view of the current increasing unemployment rate among nurses and midwives in the country, entrepreneurship offers some solutions. However, very few nurses and midwives are engaged in health-related entrepreneurial activities and empirical evidence is limited, providing a significant gap in the literature. The study sought to explore health-related entrepreneurial activities among nurses and midwives. A qualitative descriptive design was employed and eleven professional nurses and midwives who have set up health-related businesses were recruited using purposive and snowballing sampling techniques. Thematic content analysis was used to analyse the data. The findings indicated that nurses and midwives start businesses due to frustrations in their former workplaces, the desire to own a business, maintaining a family legacy, need for additional income and something to do during retirement. Nurses and midwives engaged in proactive activities to start and manage the business with the exception of validating the business opportunity and developing a business plan. Nurse-Midwife entrepreneurs always experience risk and were professionally autonomous, but had little autonomy in managing the business for lack of knowledge. The older nurse-midwife entrepreneurs were not competitively aggressive whilst the younger ones competed aggressively on the health market. There is, therefore, the need for nurses and midwives who are entrepreneurially minded to generate business ideas to start businesses that will offer employment to the unemployed nurses and midwives.