Chair of Production and Logistics Management, Department for Business Administration, Georg-August-University of Göttingen, Platz der Göttinger Sieben 3, 37073, Göttingen, Germany.
FOM University of Applied Sciences Essen, Leimkugelstr. 6, 45141, Essen, Germany.
Eur J Health Econ. 2022 Nov;23(8):1263-1285. doi: 10.1007/s10198-021-01425-7. Epub 2022 Jan 11.
The COVID-19 pandemic is a global challenge to humankind. To improve the knowledge regarding relevant, efficient and effective COVID-19 measures in health policy, this paper applies a multi-criteria evaluation approach with population, health care, and economic datasets from 19 countries within the OECD. The comparative investigation was based on a Data Envelopment Analysis approach as an efficiency measurement method. Results indicate that on the one hand, factors like population size, population density, and country development stage, did not play a major role in successful pandemic management. On the other hand, pre-pandemic healthcare system policies were decisive. Healthcare systems with a primary care orientation and a high proportion of primary care doctors compared to specialists were found to be more efficient than systems with a medium level of resources that were partly financed through public funding and characterized by a high level of access regulation. Roughly two weeks after the introduction of ad hoc measures, e.g., lockdowns and quarantine policies, we did not observe a direct impact on country-level healthcare efficiency, while delayed lockdowns led to significantly lower efficiency levels during the first COVID-19 wave in 2020. From an economic perspective, strategies without general lockdowns were identified as a more efficient strategy than the full lockdown strategy. Additionally, governmental support of short-term work is promising. Improving the efficiency of COVID-19 countermeasures is crucial in saving as many lives as possible with limited resources.
COVID-19 大流行是人类面临的全球性挑战。为了提高人们对卫生政策中相关、有效和高效的 COVID-19 措施的认识，本文应用了一种多标准评估方法，使用了来自经合组织 19 个国家的人口、医疗保健和经济数据集。比较性调查基于数据包络分析方法作为一种效率衡量方法。结果表明，一方面，人口规模、人口密度和国家发展阶段等因素在成功管理大流行方面没有发挥重要作用。另一方面，大流行前的医疗保健系统政策是决定性的。与资源水平中等、部分由公共资金供资且准入监管水平较高的系统相比，具有初级保健导向且初级保健医生比例较高的医疗保健系统效率更高。在引入特别措施（例如封锁和隔离政策）大约两周后，我们没有观察到这些措施对国家一级医疗保健效率有直接影响，而延迟封锁导致 2020 年第一波 COVID-19 期间效率水平显著降低。从经济角度来看，没有全面封锁的策略被确定为比全面封锁策略更有效的策略。此外，政府对短期工作的支持是有希望的。提高 COVID-19 对策的效率对于在有限资源的情况下挽救尽可能多的生命至关重要。
