Assessing Service Delivery in Public and Private Hospitals in Nigeria: Lagos State Perspective

Abstract

This study assesses the service delivery of public and private hospitals in
Lagos State, Nigeria for the period of 200‘8 to 2017. Convenience
sampling method was employed to select 10 public and 10 private
hospitals. The input variables are the number of Doctors, Nurses, and
hospital beds, unit cost of operation, equipment and cost of drugs
while the output variables were inpatient, outpatient, deliveries and
revenue. Data Envelopment Analysis and the Malmquist Productivity
Index (MPI) was used to calculate the efficiency and productivity growth
of the hospitals. Findings revealed that the public hospitals were more
efficient in terms of technical, allocative and cost with the mean score of
(0.899, 0.886 and 0.805) than the private hospital (0.848, 0.829 and
0.714), but both are deteriorating in productivity growth pattern due to
the technical efficiency change and technological changes. The study
recommends that government should reduce the health budget gap so
as to bring the public hospitals into healthy competition with their
foreign counterpart in order to reduce medical tourism and invariably
reduce capital flight from Nigeria. Also, for private hospitals with
inefficiency related to allocation and cost, government may need to
intervene in the spatial location to warrant fair distribution of the
facilities. This will reduce unnecessary competition among them and
improve proper utilization of available resources.