An efficiency analysis of hospitals owned by faith based organisations in Kenya
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Date
2014-08-01
Authors
Kinyanjui, George Kariuki
Journal Title
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Volume Title
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Abstract
The desired goal for Kenya's Vision 2030 and the millennium development goals is to provide
efficient and reliable healthcare that will reduce child mortality rates, improve maternal health
and ~ombat HIV/AIDS, Malaria and other diseases by the year 2015. Kenya's health care sector
has been among the most inefficient in the world characterized by high disease prevalence, high
mortality rates, low life expectancy, and poor access to healthcare services and corruption.
Addressing the above challenges and attaining the millennium development goals on reduction
of child mortality rates, improvement of maternal health and combating of HIV/AIDS makes
efficiency in health care services delivery a requisite obligation in addition to sound government
policies and stakeholder goodwill. Hospitals owned by the faith based organizations are a vital
component of health care institutions in Kenya. They form a key component of the private sector
healthcare provision with about 40 percent dominance. The operations of these hospitals depend
on donor funding, user fees and government subsidies. Dwindling donor assistance, falling
government subsidy, poor human resource for health employment and distribution coupled with
financially poor citizenry that seek the services of hospitals owned by faith based organization
has been a compelling datum to pursue efficient ways of providing healthcare. Therefore, the
question on how the scarce resources allocated to the hospitals owned by faith based
organizations are been utilized, has been of urgent need for address. This study sought to unravel
the technical and scale efficiency of hospitals owned by faith based organizations in Kenya. The
study employed the Data Envelopment Analysis which is either input oriented or output oriented.
Input orientation was adopted for this study. The input variables included medical officers,
nurses, beds and cots and an aggregate of other hospital workers; while the number of inpatients
and outpatients were the output variables for the analysis. The sample size included 30 FBO
hospitals drawn from the Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops (KCCB), the Christian Health
Association of Kenya, (CHAK) and the Supreme Council of Kenya Muslims (SUPKEM) as the
major FBO blocks in the country. The results were that only 36.67 percent of FBO hospitals
were operating efficiently under the Variable Returns to scale technical efficiency. Scale
efficiency revealed that approximately 20 percent of the FBO hospitals were scale efficient. Tn
general the study concluded that if FBO hospitals operated as a group, the technical efficiency
would be 79% while scale efficiency would be 59 percent. The key recommendation of this
study is that FBO hospitals and the other health facilities need to have a yearly efficiency
analysis to ascertain proper resource allocation. The desired goal for Kenya's Vision 2030 and the millennium development goals is to provide
efficient and reliable healthcare that will reduce child mortality rates, improve maternal health
and ~ombat HIV/AIDS, Malaria and other diseases by the year 2015. Kenya's health care sector
has been among the most inefficient in the world characterized by high disease prevalence, high
mortality rates, low life expectancy, and poor access to healthcare services and corruption.
Addressing the above challenges and attaining the millennium development goals on reduction
of child mortality rates, improvement of maternal health and combating of HIV/AIDS makes
efficiency in health care services delivery a requisite obligation in addition to sound government
policies and stakeholder goodwill. Hospitals owned by the faith based organizations are a vital
component of health care institutions in Kenya. They form a key component of the private sector
healthcare provision with about 40 percent dominance. The operations of these hospitals depend
on donor funding, user fees and government subsidies. Dwindling donor assistance, falling
government subsidy, poor human resource for health employment and distribution coupled with
financially poor citizenry that seek the services of hospitals owned by faith based organization
has been a compelling datum to pursue efficient ways of providing healthcare. Therefore, the
question on how the scarce resources allocated to the hospitals owned by faith based
organizations are been utilized, has been of urgent need for address. This study sought to unravel
the technical and scale efficiency of hospitals owned by faith based organizations in Kenya. The
study employed the Data Envelopment Analysis which is either input oriented or output oriented.
Input orientation was adopted for this study. The input variables included medical officers,
nurses, beds and cots and an aggregate of other hospital workers; while the number of inpatients
and outpatients were the output variables for the analysis. The sample size included 30 FBO
hospitals drawn from the Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops (KCCB), the Christian Health
Association of Kenya, (CHAK) and the Supreme Council of Kenya Muslims (SUPKEM) as the
major FBO blocks in the country. The results were that only 36.67 percent of FBO hospitals
were operating efficiently under the Variable Returns to scale technical efficiency. Scale
efficiency revealed that approximately 20 percent of the FBO hospitals were scale efficient. Tn
general the study concluded that if FBO hospitals operated as a group, the technical efficiency
would be 79% while scale efficiency would be 59 percent. The key recommendation of this
study is that FBO hospitals and the other health facilities need to have a yearly efficiency
analysis to ascertain proper resource allocation.