Measuring efficiency of public hospitals under the impact of Covid-19: the case of Türkiye

The Covid-19 pandemic has had serious medical, administrative and financial effects on the health system and hospitals around the world. In Türkiye, compared to 2019 realizations, in 2020 and 2021 respectively there were 39% and 21% decrease in the number of outpatient services and 29% and 17% decline in total inpatient services of public hospitals. The main subject of this research is how the pandemic period affects the Turkish public hospitals’ efficiency. We have measured the technical efficiency of outpatient and inpatient care services of Turkish public hospitals using Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA). The dataset includes 563 hospitals for the years 2015 through 2021. Inputs of number of physicians, nurses and other medical staff, and number of beds and their interactions with each other are introduced to the SFA models of outputs of outpatient visits and inpatient discharges adjusted with case mix index are derived. Firstly, we found that the years associated with Covid-19 have a significant negative impact on the inpatient service efficiency. Training and Research and City Hospitals have low efficiency scores in outpatient services but high efficiency scores in inpatient services. In addition, the regions with high population rates have positive impact in outpatient efficiency and negative impact in inpatient efficiency. During the pandemic, city hospitals, have received large investments, gained a key role by increasing both the patient load and their efficiency. Future reforms can be guided by taking advantage of the efficiency differences of hospitals in different environmental factors.