Measuring clinical department efficiency – the impact of clinical leadership job satisfaction : An application to public hospitals

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to evaluate clinical departments' performance per clinical sector in the context of the Greek public hospital care system. Design/methodology/approach – The sample consisted of 96 internal pathology and surgical clinical departments in 15 hospitals in Greece and their technical efficiency was assessed by the use of data envelopment analysis. The proposed model used the number of nursing staff, medical specialists and department beds, pharmaceutical expenditure and clinical leadership job satisfaction as inputs while the number of hospitalized patients was selected as an output. Clinical leadership job satisfaction was captured by the use of a specialized questionnaire. The methodology applied investigated variations in technical efficiency in the presence or absence of job satisfaction. The model proposed an efficiency improvement through the possible reduction of inputs (input oriented) variable returns to scale. Findings – Processing the results revealed variations in the way clinical leadership job satisfaction affects efficiency assessments per clinical sector. The impact of job satisfaction is verified for the surgical sector and rejected marginally for the pathology sector. Applied methodology results proposed reductions in pharmaceutical expenditure, human resources and available beds. These are indications towards implementing rational economic and human resources management and productive factors development. Originality/value – This research effort uses job satisfaction as a quantitative variable to assess efficiency, focusing on clinical efficiency per clinical sector. In all efforts to restrain health expenditure, measuring clinical department efficiency is critical for health policy makers.