The Technical Efficiency of Hospital Inpatient Care Services: An Application for Turkish Public Hospitals

Abstract

In this study, the efficiency analysis of Turkish Ministry of Health (MoH) hospitals' inpatient care services is done by using the Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) method. In the analysis, cross-sectional data on 459 acute-care hospitals in 2013 were used and the sample was consisted of only MoH general and teaching hospitals. A cross sectional version of SFA inefficiency effects model specification is used to estimate the inpatient care service production efficiency. The results of this paper suggest that, the technical inefficiency of inpatient care services of MoH hospitals is closely related with the hospital size. As the hospital capacity decreases or/and the role group of the hospital lowers down, the hospital efficiency scores reduces significantly. The other important finding of this paper is that the efficiency scores are inversely related with the socio-economic development level of the region or province where the hospital is located. The mean efficiency scores decreases in the western part of the Turkey which has the regions that are socio-economically more developed and more populated compared to the others.