ArticleBMJ open2020
Efficiency and scale effect of county public hospitals in Shandong Province, China: a cross-sectional study.
Article in BMJ open, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Correlation analysis between single disease quality management and efficiency indicators of a tertiary hospital in China.BMC health services research · 2025Article
- Coverage of influenza vaccination and influencing factors among healthcare workers in Shandong Province, China, 2021-2022.Human vaccines & immunotherapeutics · 2024Article
- Resource allocation efficiency in 68 county-level traditional Chinese medicine hospitals in China: a data envelopment analysis.BMJ open · 2024Article
- Effects of medical consortium policy on health services: an interrupted time-series analysis in Sanming, China.Frontiers in public health · 2024Article
- Configurations associated with the efficiency of the ophthalmology departments in public hospitals of Central South China.PloS one · 2024Article
- A Cohort Study of the Relationship between Active Collaboration and Operational Efficiency in Japanese Public Health Institutions.JMA journal · 2022Article
- Configurational Paths to Higher Efficiency in County Hospital: Evidence From Qualitative Comparative Analysis.Frontiers in public health · 2022Article
- Article
- The effect of Iran's health transformation plan on hospital performance: Kerman province.PloS one · 2021Article
- The efficiency of provincial government health care expenditure after China's new health care reform.PloS one · 2021Article
- Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectiveTo evaluate the efficiency of county public hospitals in Shandong Province following China's new medical reform and compare the efficiency of hospitals with different bed sizes for improving efficiency. DESIGN AND
settingThis was a cross-sectional study on the efficiency and size of 68 county public hospitals in China in 2017. OUTCOME MEASURES: Data envelopment analysis was used to calculate the efficiency scores of hospitals and to analyse the slack values of inefficient hospitals. The actual number of open beds, doctors, nurses and total expenditure were selected as inputs, and the total number of annual visits, discharges and total income were selected as outputs. The Kruskal-Wallis H test was employed to compare the efficiency of hospitals with different bed sizes. The χ
resultsTwenty (29.41%) hospitals were efficient. There were 27 hospitals with increasing returns to scale, 23 hospitals with constant returns to scale and 18 hospitals with decreasing returns to scale (DRS). The differences in technical efficiency (p=0.248, p>0.05) and pure technical efficiency (p=0.073, p>0.05) were not statistically significant. However, the differences in scale efficiency (p=0.047, p<0.05) and RTS (p<0.001) were statistically significant. Hospitals with DRS began to appear at 885 beds. All sample hospitals with more than 1100 beds were already saturated and some hospitals even had a negative scale effect.
conclusionsThe government and hospital managers should strictly control the bed size in hospitals and make hospitals resume operating in the interests of public welfare. Interventions that rationally allocate health resources and improve the efficiency of medical workers are conducive to solving redundant inputs and insufficient outputs.
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