The productive performance of public hospital clinics in Greece: a case study.

One of the most important and crucial issues for political and social reasons in Greece is the reorganization of the public sector health system--more precisely, the improvement of public hospital operations, both in terms of the resources they use and the quality and quantity of the services they provide. This study focuses on investigating the productivity performance of 10 clinics in a public hospital located in Thessaloniki. The methodology applied is the data envelopment analysis (DEA) to measure the Malmquist productivity index. The results indicated that the efficiency of the hospital clinics has improved. However, clinics' efficiency varies a lot from month to month. In a competitive environment, these differences need to be addressed, investigated and reduced in order to improve total efficiency.