Performance Evaluation of Public Hospitals in Tamil Nadu

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is used to investigate the relative efficiency of a set of decision-making units (DMUs). Government departments, such as, medical sciences, public health and preventive medicine, are providing primary and secondary care to the people of Tamil Nadu. The units of these departments are expected to function as health centres in terms of preventive medicine, hygiene and other public health issues. This study aims to obtain the technical efficiency (TE) of 31 district hospitals in the state, which come under the department of medical sciences. Here, district hospitals in the state of Tamil Nadu are considered as DMUs. The variables chosen included number of beds, staff nurses, assistant surgeons/civil surgeons as inputs, and outpatients treated, major surgeries and total deliveries performed as outputs. An output-oriented Banker, Charnes and Cooper (BCC) model was considered for DEA, allowing variable return to scale (VRS), and units were marked according to the benchmarking approach. Results indicate that nine of the 31 hospitals (29 per cent) are efficient, while the remaining 22 (71 per cent) are relatively inefficient, and they need to improvise their performance with that of their peer group.