OPERATIONAL PERFORMANCE AND ECONOMIES OF SCALE IN HEALTHCARE UNITS OF PUNJAB, PAKISTAN

Abstract

In order to improve the quality of healthcare services in Punjab, the health department has been applying numerous reforms such as upgrading and expansion of public healthcare facilities. To observe the performance of healthcare facilities, efficiency analysis is very important.The aim of this research is to measure the technical efficiency (TE) and scale efficiency (SE) among District Headquarters (DHQs) hospitals of Punjab. A linear programming, Data envelopment analysis (DEA), the technique is used to measure the efficiencies score of these hospitals for the period 2011 to 2015. The inputs data contained the number of doctors, nurses, other staff (paramedical and non-paramedical), and beds while outputs represented by the number of outpatients and inpatients visited in all the departments of these hospitals. The result revealed that out of 25 DHQs hospitals, 6 (24%) and 4 (16%) are fullytechnically and scale efficient respectively and lied on best practice frontier. The TE scores of the hospitals are ranged between 0.55 and 1 with the average of 0.86 while the scale efficiency scores are between 0.37 and 1. The average scale efficiency score is 0.82 which implies that, on average, these hospitals are able to reduce 18 percent of their resources while keeping the same level of output.