Abstract
BackgroundThe present study has been undertaken with the aim to evaluate performance and ranking of various universities of medical sciences that are responsible for providing public health services and primary health care in Iran.MethodsFour models; Weighted Factor Analysis (WFA), Equal Weighting (EW), Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA), and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) have been applied for evaluating the performance of universities of medical sciences. This study was commenced based on the statistical reports of the Ministry of Health and Medical Education (MOHME), census data from the Statistical Center of Iran, indicators of Vital Statistics, results of Multiple Indicator of Demographic and Health Survey 2010, and results of the National Survey of Risk Factors of non-communicable diseases.ResultsThe average performance scores in WFA, EW, SFA, and DEA methods for the universities were 0.611, 0.663, 0.736 and 0.838, respectively. In all 4 models, the performance scores of universities were different (range from 0.56–1, 0.53–1, 0.73–1 and 0.83–1 in WFA, EW, SFA and DEA models, respectively). Gilan and Rafsanjan universities with the average ranking score of 4.75 and 41 had the highest and lowest rank among universities, respectively. The universities of Gilan, Ardabil and Bojnourd in all four models had the highest performance among the top 15 universities, while the universities of Rafsanjan, Ahvaz, Kerman and Jiroft showed poor performance in all models.ConclusionsThe average performance scores have varied based on different measurement methods, so judging the performance of universities based solely on the results of a model can be misleading. In all models, the performance of universities has been different, which indicates the need for planning to balance the performance improvement of universities based on learning from the experiences of well-performing universities.
Highlights
The present study has been undertaken with the aim to evaluate performance and ranking of various universities of medical sciences that are responsible for providing public health services and primary health care in Iran
To facilitate the reporting and interpretation of the results, the term “University” is used to refer to the primary health care and public health systems in which services are organized in the form of activities developed by the health deputies of the universities of medical sciences
The health deputy of each university is responsible for providing primary health care and public health services to the population living in a region in their realm
Summary
The timely management of performance and monitoring and the evaluation of the programs by guaranteeing the continuous improvement of programs is considered to be an important factor in the reduction of regional inequalities in health outcomes [20]. Samples of such studies are observed in Spain [21], Germany [22, 23], India [19, 24, 25], Ghana [26], Brazil [27], Kenya [28], South Africa [29], and Mozambique [30]
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