What are the Technical and Allocative Efficiencies of Public Health Centres in Ghana?

Health systems in developing countries including Ghana are faced with critical resource constraints in pursuing the goal of improving the health status of the population. The constrained ability to adequately meet health care needs is exacerbated by inefficiency in the health care systems, especially within public health centres.

The study used Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method, to calculate the technical and allocative efficiency of 113 randomly sampled health centres. A logistic regression model was also applied on whether a health centre was technically efficient or not to determine the factors that significantly influence the efficiency of health centres.

The findings showed that 78% of health centres were technically inefficient and so were using resources that they did not actually need. Eight-eight percent were also allocatively inefficient. The overall efficiency, (product of the technical and allocative efficiency), was also calculated and over 90% of the health centres were inefficient. The results of a logistic regression analysis shows that newer health centres and those which receive incentives were more likely to be technically efficient compared to older health centres and those who did receive incentives.

The results broadly point to grave inefficiency in the health care delivery system of the health centres and that lots of resources could be saved if measures were put in place to curb the waste. Incentives to health centres were found to be major motivating factors to the promotion of efficiency.