Leadership in Health Services

Purpose – The importance of health care is growing worldwide, and the health sector receives a good proportion of GDP. As health care costs are increasing, it is important to assess the performance of health care facilities across countries. Therefore, this paper aims to examine the effectiveness of data envelopment analysis, which is one of the most important techniques currently available to model and measure the efficiency of national health care systems across the world.

Design/methodology/approach – In this paper, the effectiveness of the operation of 180 countries is evaluated using data envelopment analysis (DEA). The countries selected are the members of the World Health Organization. Efficiency measures are calculated with respect to two groups of indicators, namely health status and health service coverage. In the health status group, four outputs representing mortality rates and one input representing the total expenditure on health is used in the analysis. In the health service coverage group, two outputs representing immunisation coverage and one input representing the total expenditure on health are used in the analysis.

Findings – Using data for the year 2008 from World Health Statistics (WHO), 45 countries are found to be efficient.

Originality/value – The value of the paper lies in the fact that it is one of the few studies to examine the robustness of data envelopment analysis to evaluate the performance of health care systems across countries.