A cost and performance comparison of Public Private Partnership and public hospitals in Spain

Public-private partnership (PPP) initiatives are extending around the world, especially in Europe, as an innovation to traditional public health systems, with the intention of making them more efficient. There is a varied range of PPP models with different degrees of responsibility from simple public sector contracts with the private, up to the complete privatisation of the service. As such, we may say the involvement of the private sector embraces the development, financing and provision of public infrastructures and delivery services. In this paper, one of the oldest PPP initiatives developed in Spain and transferred to other European and Latin American countries is evaluated for first time: the integrated healthcare delivery Alzira model. Through a comparison of public and PPP hospital performance, cost and quality indicators, the efficiency of the PPP experience in five hospitals is evaluated to identify the influence of private management in the results. Regarding the performance and efficiency analysis, it is seen that the PPP group obtains good results, above the average, but not always better than those directly managed. It is necessary to conduct studies with a greater number of PPP hospitals to obtain conclusive results. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13561-016-0095-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.