Measuring the efficiency and quality of health services management provided in government hospitals In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Abstract

During the current period, the health services sector at the Ministry of Health in the Kingdom has witnessed an unprecedented boom in the field of providing high-quality health services to achieve comprehensive health coverage for all members of society in accordance with the Kingdom’s Vision 2030 of the necessity of providing a distinguished service that enjoys the acceptance and satisfaction of the Saudi citizen and receives acceptance from all members of society.

Given the importance of the healthcare service provided, its quality, and its impact on patients to maintain the public health of all community members, it has become necessary to measure the quality and efficiency of the healthcare services provided in hospitals and government health centers in the Kingdom. This is to ensure the quality of the service provided to maintain the health of patients, as well as to identify the negatives and problems that hinder management from achieving distinguished service with high quality considering the strong competition between the public and private healthcare sectors in this field. The results indicated that the Jeddah health region ranked third in terms of the volume of available health resources, with a total of approximately 49 hospitals and 8,200 beds under the health sector in Jeddah, distributed among the Ministry of Health.

The capacity efficiency ratio for the health regions in the Kingdom reached approximately 0.971, according to the nature of the return on capacity. This means that some health regions have not yet achieved optimal capacity efficiency in their hospitals and can reach it by increasing their available health resources by approximately 2.9%. By estimating the average surplus of inputs for the hospitals in the health regions, it becomes clear that there are surpluses in the utilized inputs (doctors, beds, nursing staff) in the hospitals of these health regions that can be reduced without affecting the service performance level in those hospitals. Additionally, there is a management issue in the hospitals of the Holy Capital, Qassim, Eastern Province, Tabuk, Najran, and Al-Jawf regions. These hospitals may need to redistribute their resources to other areas to ensure efficient management of their available health resources by the Ministry of Health in the Kingdom. As for the hospitals in the other health regions, the management responsible for them is making optimal use of their resources, achieving efficiency for these health facilities. The other regions should follow their example in managing their resources.

It is evident from the results of the probabilistic distribution of the problems or obstacles affecting the availability of health services from the beneficiaries' perspective, according to the opinions of the patients in the research sample in the Jeddah area, that the most important problems and their probabilistic distribution at a 95% confidence level are as follows: the lack of rare specialties in hospitals, which ranked first among the problems with a frequency of about 175 patients, accounting for approximately 97%. The confidence interval for the probability of this problem occurring ranged from a minimum of about 95% to a maximum of about 100%. In second place was the problem of insufficient time for examination and diagnosis, with a frequency of about 162 patients, accounting for approximately 90%. The confidence interval for the probability of this problem occurring ranged from a minimum of about 86% to a maximum of about 94%.