Secondary Hospitals in West Bengal: Health Care Resources and Technological Efficiency

This paper attempts to locate the distributional inequality of health care and efficiency of utilization of those resources in West Bengal. Output oriented Data Envelopment Analysis under VRS and Group Frontier approach has been used. Data have been collected through a primary survey funded by Government of West Bengal. Results show that there is a significant inequality in distribution of resources across region, violating the basic iota of 'vertical equity'. The overall mean efficiency of all hospitals is 0.728, suggesting that they could produce at least 37 per cent more of output with the same input volume. The scarce resources are sub-optimally used. The group frontier analysis shows that bigger hospitals situated in backward regions perform badly compared with others. The policy must attempt to reduce the inequitable distribution of resources and control the under-utilization of resources available with the hospitals.