Measuring the efficiency of multi-level healthcare facilities with stochastic demand : a labour requirements frontier approach

Abstract

This thesis is concerned with estimating efficiency using stochastic frontier analysis (SFA). It is argued that a classical SPA approach is the most appropriate technique for estimating efficiency scores for healthcare firms. The firms considered in this work are out-of-hours (OOH) co-ops that supply OOH primary care throughout the island of Ireland. These co-ops operate as a two-level structure, with a number of treatment centres operating within each co-op. Therefore, it is necessary to incorporate a multi-level framework into the analysis, as well as specifying a SFA approach that makes sense to the OOH co-op’s own characteristics and structure. While this may seem obvious, it is argued that this is often not practised in healthcare applications.