Determinants of the Inefficiency of Public Hospitals in Cameroon

The purpose of this paper was to assess the determinants of the inefficiency of public hospitals in Cameroon. The methods employed in the study involved a two-stage analysis technique whereby Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) was applied using the traditional inputs and outputs with data from the National Institute of Statistics (NIS) of Cameroon. The efficiency scores from the first stage were then transformed into inefficiency scores and regressed on the environmental variables using the censored regression model (Tobit Model). We found that corruption and location of health facility were signficant determinants of inefficiency; hospitals became more efficient when exposed to competition and when bed occupancy increased. The number of supervisions and size of health facility did not have a signficant effect on inefficiency while age of health facility, distance covered by patients to hospitals, distance separating public hospital from closest private hospital were negative but insignficant determinants of inefficiency. It was then concluded that Identifying the determinants of inefficiency helps hospitals to restructure how they manage their operations since improved performance helps better resource utilisation, control cost and increase accesss to healthcare.