Abstract:
Introduction: 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.
Methods: 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.
Findings: 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 show 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.
Conclusion: 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.