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Delivering Cost Effective Healthcare Services

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In recent years, governments are searching for ways to deliver the equity, efficiency, cost-effectiveness healthcare services to maintain and improve their health systems (WHO, 2004). The aim of equal access to health care for all population groups is the common target for many health care systems. The Australian health care system provides resources on the equal access of a mixed private and public funding system which covers the entire population. As Palmer & Torgerson (1999) pointed out that decision makers in healthcare flied are dealing with the increasing challenges of the growing demand for health care services with limited funds. Whereas economists argued that the achievement of greater efficiency from reasonable resources should …show more content…

Most important is the final health outcomes such as how many lives saved, how many life years gained, quality of life years enjoyed ( Palmer & Torgerson, 1994). According to Palmer & Torgerson (1999), the concept of efficiency can be divided into three types: 1: Technical efficiency: it is related to the physical relation between resources and health outcomes. Technical efficiency is normally achieved by maximizing the possible improvements in outcome are gained from a set of resource inputs. An intervention is technically inefficient if the same outcome could be produced with less of one type of input. 2: Productive efficiency: The concept of productive efficiency refers to use the given cost to maximise the health outcome, or maximize the outcome within the least cost. In health care, productive efficiency permits the evaluation of the relative value for money to be used for interventions with comparable outcomes. However, widely speaking, productive efficiency cannot emphasize the impact of reallocating resources such as from one medical field to another because the health outcomes are disproportionate. 3: Allocative efficiency: it is achieved by reallocating the resources to maximize the benefits for the society. Allocative efficiency is determined not only by the productive efficiency, which uses health care resources to produce maximum health outcomes, but also the efficiency that

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