It is recommended that the inefficient hospitals learn from their efficient peers identified by the DEA model so as to improve the overall performance of the health system.Īt the Millennium Summit in 2000, Member States of the United Nations (UN) reaffirmed their commitment to eradicate world poverty and improve the health and welfare of the world's poorest by 2015. It is concluded that the existing level of pure technical and scale inefficiency of the district hospitals is considerably high and may negatively affect the government's initiatives to improve access to quality health care and scaling up of interventions that are necessary to achieve the health-related Millennium Development Goals. Increasing returns to scale is observed to be the predominant form of scale inefficiency. Less than half of the hospitals included in the study were located on the technically efficient frontier. The average technical efficiency level during the given period was less than 75%. The findings suggest the presence of substantial degree of pure technical and scale inefficiency. To test for the robustness of the DEA technical efficiency scores the Jackknife analysis was used. Data for four financial years (1997/98 to 2000/2001) was used for the analysis. The DEA model used three inputs and two outputs. Hospital capacity utilization ratios and the data envelopment analysis (DEA) technique were used to assess technical efficiency.

MethodĪll public sector hospitals (N = 30) were included in the study. It is therefore necessary to quantify the level of technical inefficiency in the countries so as to alert policy makers of the potential resource gains to the health system if the hospitals that absorb a lion's share of the available resources are technically efficient. However, the supply of health care resources to address the problems has been continuously declining, thus jeopardizing the progress towards achieving the health-related Millennium Development Goals. In most countries of the sub-Saharan Africa, health care needs have been increasing due to emerging and re-emerging health problems.

Data envelopment analysis excel