This paper assessed whether the public district hospitals in Ghana are technically efficient to meet the challenge of possible increase in health care demand by Ghanaians that might result from the introduction of the National Health Insurance Scheme.The Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach was used to estimate the efficiency of 51 Public District Hospitals. The results show an average overall Technical Efficiency of 77.6%, pure Technical Efficiency of 84.5% and Scale Efficiency of 92.1%. Out of the 51 public district hospitals used in the study, 30 of them were purely technically inefficient. The results also indicate that in general a total of 102 Medical and Pharmacy Staff, 530 General Administrative Staff, 462 Nursing Staff and 830 beds are wasted or not utilized in health care delivery by the public district hospitals. This indicates that any immediate increase in health care demand as a result of the National Health Insurance Scheme will not necessitate an increase in health care expenditure by the government but instead health care management should be called upon to operate more efficiently. The study concludes that there is potential to improve access and/quality of care without injecting additional resources into the health sector.
Keywords: Allocative Efficiency, Health Insurance, Hospitals, Technical Efficiency, input slacks
