An investigation into the work-life balance of female employees in the public health care sector: A case study of female Nurses and Doctors in the Ghanaian National Teaching Hospital (Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital- KBTH) - Anonymised NVivo Code Themes: Work-life Balance of Female Nurses and Doctors in a Ghanaian Teaching Hospital

Work-life balance among female healthcare professionals matters for workforce retention, wellbeing, and safe patient care in Ghana. Yet Ghana-based research on work-life balance in healthcare is still dominated by single-profession or non-teaching hospital settings, and it rarely explains how organisational culture and socio-cultural caregiving expectations interact in everyday boundary management, or the strategies used to achieve work-life balance. This study addresses that gap by examining female nurses and female doctors in a teaching hospital and analysing how they negotiate work and non-work boundaries. Using a qualitative single-case research approach and interviews with 34 female health professionals at Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital, the study finds that organisational culture constrains work-life balance through rota rigidity and short-notice schedule changes, chronic understaffing and high patient loads, a norm of presenteeism and heroic availability, and informal cross-coverage practices that substitute for formal policy but often shift additional work onto women. The data were analysed thematically. In parallel, socio-cultural expectations intensify non-work pressures through gendered primary caregiving, obligations to extended kin and faith communities, and ideals of the good mother and wife, which create social penalties when women set boundaries. The interaction of these forces produces persistent spillover, guilt, and career trade-offs. The study advances Work/Family Border Theory by developing the Female Healthcare Professionals Contextualised Work/life Border Model (FHP-CWLBM) for resource-constrained, patriarchal settings. The novel model specifies how boundary permeability and flexibility are shaped by institutional scheduling power, organisational hierarchy, and the risk of social and professional sanction, which operates as a distinct mechanism influencing women’s boundary choices in patriarchal, resource-constrained settings. The model also explains how communal coping strategies such as shift swaps and peer backup function as shadow boundary control that can reduce immediate strain while reproducing inequalities over time. Practically, these findings support gender responsive interventions, including enforceable flexible rostering with protected time off, transparent and policy-backed rules for shift swaps and cross coverage, staffing safeguards to reduce chronic overtime, supervisor development to counter presenteeism norms, and practical support such as childcare and lactation facilities. However, the findings also show that these measures will have limited effect if they are implemented as isolated initiatives. Sustainable improvements in WLB require systemic recognition of the gendered caregiving responsibilities that shape women’s capacity to negotiate work-life borders. The study therefore positions WLB not simply as an individual wellbeing issue, but as a workforce retention, gender equity and healthcare quality concern requiring coordinated organisational and health-system action. This dataset contains anonymised qualitative coding outputs developed in NVivo for a doctoral study investigating the work-life balance of female nurses and doctors in a Ghanaian teaching hospital. The dataset includes initial codes, themes, subthemes and anonymised participant extracts identified using respondent codes R1-R34. The coding was developed from semi-structured interview data and used to support the thematic analysis reported in the doctoral thesis. Direct identifiers and potentially identifying contextual information have been removed or generalised for repository deposit.