Research
BioMed Central
Open Access
Technical efficiency of public district hospitals and health centres in Ghana: a pilot study
Daniel Osei1, Selassi d'Almeida2, Melvill O George2, Joses M Kirigia*3, Ayayi Omar Mensah3 and Lenity H Kainyu4
Address: 1Planning and Budget Unit, PPME, Ghana Health Service, Accra, Ghana, 2WHO Country Office, Accra, Ghana, 3World Health Organization, Regional Office for Africa, Brazzaville, Congo and 4Department of Health Sciences, School of Public Health, Kenyatta University, Nairobi, Kenya Email: Daniel Osei - oseid@hotmail.com; Selassi d'Almeida - dalmeidas@whoghana.org; Melvill O George - GeorgeM@whoghana.org; Joses M Kirigia* - kirigiaj@afro.who.int; Ayayi Omar Mensah - mensaho@afro.who.int; Lenity H Kainyu - kainyulh@yahoo.com * Corresponding author
Published: 27 September 2005 Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation 2005, 3:9 doi:10.1186/1478-7547-3-9
Received: 16 May 2005 Accepted: 27 September 2005
This article is available from: http://www.resource-allocation.com/content/3/1/9 © 2005 Osei et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
Background: The Government of Ghana has been implementing various health sector reforms (e.g. user fees in public health facilities, decentralization, sector-wide approaches to donor coordination) in a bid to improve efficiency in health care. However, to date, except for the pilot study reported in this paper, no attempt has been made to make an estimate of the efficiency of hospitals and/or health centres in Ghana. The objectives of this study, based on data collected in 2000, were: (i) to estimate the relative technical efficiency (TE) and scale efficiency