School of Economics, Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou, China.
Front Public Health. 2022 Apr 14;10:879698. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2022.879698. eCollection 2022.
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has brought several challenges to China's national health services, causing great risks and uncertainties to people's lives. Considering China's huge population and relatively small medical investment and its good performance in the COVID-19 pandemic, this research utilizes the hybrid meta-frontier model to analyze health expenditure efficiencies of 30 provinces in China from 1999 to 2018 and compares spatial and temporal differences of the efficiencies in regards to regional forward position and national common frontier. The results show an obvious difference in health expenditure efficiency in different provinces along the regional frontier, in which the efficiency gap in the eastern region is the largest. Moreover, the room for improvement in health expenditure efficiency varies from region to region. For the national common frontier, Beijing is the most efficient, while Guizhou is the least. The eastern region owns the most efficient technical level of health expenditure efficiency, and there is a large efficiency distance between it and the western region. The findings offer effective guidance for elevating the expenditure structure and spatial resource allocation of public health and for promoting the equalization of high quality basic medical services.
新冠疫情爆发给中国国家卫生服务带来了多重挑战，给人们的生活带来了巨大的风险和不确定性。考虑到中国庞大的人口数量、相对较少的医疗投入以及在新冠疫情中的良好表现，本研究利用混合前沿模型，分析了 1999 年至 2018 年中国 30 个省份的卫生支出效率，并比较了区域前沿和国家共同前沿的效率的时空差异。结果表明，不同省份的卫生支出效率沿区域前沿存在明显差异，其中东部地区的效率差距最大。此外，各地区卫生支出效率的提升空间也各不相同。就国家共同前沿而言，北京的效率最高，而贵州的效率最低。东部地区拥有最高的卫生支出效率技术水平，与西部地区存在较大的效率差距。这些发现为提高公共卫生支出结构和空间资源配置，促进高质量基本医疗服务均等化提供了有效指导。
