Assessment Of Different Production Functions Of 10 Hospitals From An European Region For 2012-2018

The subject of discussion is the health care production function. Similarly, waiting time for elective surgery is an important problem in today's medical world. The objective is to evaluate the most appropriate econometric model for the study of hospital production functions. To analyse the existence of growth or decrease of scale for the different hospitals. The data used refer to public hospitals in Galicia for the period 2012-2018, including the number of beds, the number of physicians, and the number of discharges per Diagnosis Related Group (DRG). The method used are econometric models with panel data to estimate Cobb-Douglas functions, Translog, and Leontief model. The results show that the Translog model is more adequate than the Cobb-Douglas or the Leontief model to evaluate the hospital production function, for public hospitals located in Galicia, for the study period. The elasticity of the labour factor is positive while that of the capital factor is negative. The capital factor is complementary to the labour factor, which can be a substitute for the former. The best model for assessing the hospitalisation production function in the sample hospitals is the Translog, followed by the Cobb-Douglas. In this model, the labour factor shows increasing returns to scale as opposed to the capital factor. The results show that the labour factor seems to be complementary to the capital factor.