Lin Jwu-Rong, Chen Ching-Yu, Peng Tso-Kwei
Department of International Business, Tunghai University, Taichung 40704, Taiwan.
Department of Business Administration, Asia University, Taichung 41354, Taiwan.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2017 Sep 11;14(9):1047. doi: 10.3390/ijerph14091047.
The purpose of this research is to examine the relation between operating efficiency and the quality of care of senior care facilities. We designed a data envelopment analysis, combining epsilon-based measure and metafrontier efficiency analyses to estimate the operating efficiency for senior care facilities, followed by an iterative seemingly unrelated regression to evaluate the relation between the quality of care and operating efficiency. In the empirical studies, Taiwan census data was utilized and findings include the following: Despite the greater operating scale of the general type of senior care facilities, their average metafrontier technical efficiency is inferior to that of nursing homes. We adopted senior care facility accreditation results from Taiwan as a variable to represent the quality of care and examined the relation of accreditation results and operating efficiency. We found that the quality of care of general senior care facilities is negatively related to operating efficiency; however, for nursing homes, the relationship is not significant. Our findings show that facilities invest more in input resources to obtain better ratings in the accreditation report. Operating efficiency, however, does not improve. Quality competition in the industry in Taiwan is inefficient, especially for general senior care facilities.
本研究的目的是考察老年护理机构运营效率与护理质量之间的关系。我们设计了一种数据包络分析，结合基于ε的测度和元前沿效率分析来估计老年护理机构的运营效率，随后进行迭代看似不相关回归，以评估护理质量与运营效率之间的关系。在实证研究中，使用了台湾人口普查数据，研究结果如下：尽管一般类型的老年护理机构运营规模更大，但其平均元前沿技术效率低于养老院。我们采用台湾老年护理机构认证结果作为代表护理质量的变量，并考察了认证结果与运营效率之间的关系。我们发现，一般老年护理机构的护理质量与运营效率呈负相关；然而，对于养老院来说，这种关系并不显著。我们的研究结果表明，机构投入更多的投入资源以在认证报告中获得更好的评级。然而，运营效率并未提高。台湾该行业的质量竞争是低效的，尤其是对于一般老年护理机构而言。
