Thai Quoc Khanh
Tokyo Metropolitan University, Japan
Title: Evaluating efficiency of english foundation trusts under budget austerity and system restructuring: DEA approach with longitudinal data and two-stage analysis
Biography
Biography: Thai Quoc Khanh
Abstract
The English healthcare sector underwent unprecedented budget tightening and system restructuring over the period from 2009 to 2016. Improving the efficiency of the healthcare services, and hospitals in particular, was one of the core objectives of the restructure. Our study assesses the efficiency of foundation trusts in England and identifies factors that influenced the efficiency of these providers. While Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is widely used in measuring hospital efficiency, there has been a relative scarcity of contemporary DEA studies conducted on English hospitals. We conducted second-stage analysis by regressing super technical efficiency scores (yielded from DEA) against a range of explanatory variables. We found evidence of a positive significant association with the financial position of the health trusts (that is, as deficit increased efficiency decreased). This finding suggests that while we might expect hospital efficiency could be improved under budget constraint pressure, this expected outcome was not the case (possibly due to inadequate control resources used). In addition, scope (range of services), and the proportion of elderly patients had a negative and statistically significant association; bed occupancy, on the contrary, had a positive statistically significant association on the efficiency of acute trusts. Our results therefore suggest that diseconomies of scope have been realise, and therefore moves to expand the number of services further should be carefully considered. The positive association with occupancy rate suggests that better management of patient flows and resource utilization might improve efficiency.