An Empirical Study On Health Resource Allocation And Utilization Efficiency In Rural Medical Institutions

The health resources work as the foundation for people to achieve medical service, constitute a vital part of the medical and health system. But the health resources are kind of quasi public goods which has the nature of scarcity and limitation. Improve the fairness in the distribution of health resources could guarantee each person in need can get access to the basic health resources, thus improve the accessibility of basic medical services; Improve the efficiency of health resources utilization can maximize the output of limited resources, thus improve the level of overall social welfare. Our government attached particular importance to the health protection,-which had gone through three medical reforms since the founding of our nation. And a lot of manpower, material and financial resources are invested in it to change the backward situation of our country’s health protection, all the efforts made a lot of brilliant achievements. However, with the national economic and cultural level unceasing enhancement, the residents’needs for medical service have also raised, whether the current allocation and utilization of health resources could meet the new requirements still need to be verified.The township health centers play an important role by serves as the hub of the three levels system of rural medical service. It shows realistic significance to study on health resources of township health centers. Thus, this article use data which collected through the National Natural Science Fund Project to described the historical evolution, current situation of health resource allocation, and the usage of medical resources of the township health centers from three aspects:the health resources in the medical equipment, human resources and asset condition. And divided the samples into three economic regions according to the economic level of the villages each rural hospital locates in, and analysis the difference of application and usage of health resources between different economic regions. Then, analysis the efficiency and the factors affecting efficiency of health resources by using DEA-Tobit two stage method. In the first phase, we calculated the comprehensive efficiency of the health resources utilization, pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency by constructing a DEA model, and analyzed the factors causing inefficiency through the target mapping analysis from the input-output point of view. In the second phase, the comprehensive efficiency which calculated by DEA method is used as the dependent variable to analyze the internal and external factors which affects the efficiency through the Tobit regression.Through these analyses, this article draws the following four conclusions:1. With the national investment, health resources increased with each passing year, the capacity of health resources in township health hospitals have been greatly improved.2. The differences of the health resources application in township health hospital are obvious among different economic regions,3. The differences of health resources utilization among different areas are huge, the comprehensive efficiency and pure technical efficiency of health resources utilization is low, and the difference of scale efficiency form different regions is significant.4. The main factors effect on the efficiency of the utilization of health resources in township health hospital are from two aspects of internal and external factors.