Examination of Turkey's health system efficiency

Purpose: The rapid increase in the share of health expenditures in recent years and the efforts of the countries to use the limited resources efficiently have been the essential factor that accelerated the efficiency studies at the macro level in the health sector. This research was conducted to Turkey to examine the efficiency of the health system at the provincial level (NUTS-3). This study also investigates sources of inefficiency and the factors influencing that efficiency in Turkey. Materials and Methods: In the research, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) for efficiency and multivariate Tobit regression analysis were used to determine the factors related to efficiency. Efficiency analysis were performed in the study with input-oriented CCR, BCC and RTS methods. In the analysis for each province is taken total hospital beds (per 1 000 population), physicians density (per 1 000 population), nurses density (per 1 000 population) as an input and infant mortality (per 1000 live births), and life expectancy at birth as output. Results: According to the research findings, 10 provinces were found to be total efficiency (CCR) and 14 provinces were technically efficiency (BCC). The average total efficiency score of the provinces was found to be 0.8051 (CCR), and the technical efficiency score was 0.8332 0,8332 is 0.9649. Conclusion: The inefficiency in the inputs of the provinces is partly due to the inefficiency of scale, while the technical inefficiency is largely due to resource use. The research findings provided information to managers and policymakers about the technical efficiency of the provinces and the changes to be made in health inputs to make the inefficient provinces relatively efficient.