Estimating technical efficiency of public sector hospitals of Uttarakhand (India)

Abstract

This paper examines the technical and scale efficiencies of 36 public sector hospitals of Uttarakhand, a State of India, for the year 2011 (calendar year) using data envelopment analysis (DEA) technique. Number of beds, number of doctors and number of paramedical staff are taken as input variables and number of outdoor-patients and number of indoor-patients as output variables along with two case-mix outputs, i.e., number of major surgery and number of minor surgery received. The data for the study have been collected from the Directorate of Medical Health and Family Welfare, Government of Uttarakhand, Dehradun, India. The study concludes that overall efficiency of hospitals is 77.20%. However, the efficiency scores vary across regions and categories. The hospitals located in the Garhwal region are found to perform better than their counterparts located in the Kumaon region. Category-wise comparison of efficiencies indicates that the district male/female hospitals have relatively higher efficiency scores than the combined/base hospitals. Further, hospitals situated in the plain/partially plain areas are found to have higher efficiency than those situated in the hilly areas of the state. Sensitivity analysis is conducted to examine the robustness of results and Tobit regression is applied to study the impact of various background/environmental factors on the efficiency scores of the hospitals.