Measuring efficiency in health care: an application to out of hours primary care services in the island of Ireland

Grace Lordan

Health, Econometrics and Data Group (HEDG) Working Papers from HEDG, c/o Department of Economics, University of York

Abstract: This paper is a cross border study that explores isolating the efficiency component and measuring its overall contribution to productivity in the case of out of hours (OOH) primary care services operating on the Island of Ireland. Out of hours GP care is supplied throughout the Island of Ireland by OOH co-operatives. Although Northern Ireland (NI) and the Republic of Ireland (ROI) have their own individual health systems the OOH organisations themselves are relatively homogenous in structure. The data for this study has been gathered and collated by the author and relates to six of twelve co-operatives operating in ROI and five of the seven co-operatives in NI. The primary aim of this paper is to estimate efficiency for these organisations using stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) SFA was chosen as the method for analysis as it allows distinction between ‘noise’ effects and efficiency effects. This paper outlines the means that SFA methodology can be used to derive sensible and robust efficiency estimates for OOH primary care organizations operating on the Island of Ireland. The paper also examines the sensitivity of these estimates to the choice of functional form for the health production function, the choice of error distribution for the efficiency terms and the means in which heterogeneity is incorporated into the analysis. Individual efficiency estimates, rankings, cross border rankings and comparisons are reported to allow recommendations to be made on how these organizations can improve their production process.

Keywords: Primary Care; Out of Hours; Efficiency; Stochastic Production Frontiers. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff and nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.york.ac.uk/media/economics/documents/herc/wp/07_08.pdf Main text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:yor:hectdg:07/08

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Health, Econometrics and Data Group (HEDG) Working Papers from HEDG, c/o Department of Economics, University of York HEDG/HERC, Department of Economics and Related Studies, University of York, York, YO10 5DD, United Kingdom. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jane Rawlings ().