Efficiency & Productivity of Public Hospitals in Cameroon

This study assesses efficiency and productivity for a panel data set comprising 109 public health facilities with applications of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), Malmquist Productivity Index and Tobit Analysis. Efficiency was examined in terms of hospitals' abilities to use minimum (fixed quantity) of resources to produce as much output as possible. The analysis indicated that there exist high levels of inefficiency within public hospitals in Cameroon and they also obtained very low productivity scores, VRS efficiency Scores were generally higher than CRS efficiency scores; Rural health facilities were the least efficient compared to semi-urban and urban health facilities while Integrated Health Centres were highly inefficient than Sub-divisional and District hospitals respectively. The Tobit results show that inefficiency in public hospitals could be explained by the combined influence of corruption, location, bed occupancy and size of health facility.