Slovak healthcare system is very ineffective.

• The idea behind health sector efficiency aims to assess the degree to which inputs into the health system, including expenditures and other resources, are effectively employed to achieve valued goals within the health system. This is important because ineffective care has the potential to result in suboptimal outcomes for directly impacted patients, whether measured in terms of their health advancements or their overall satisfaction with the healthcare system. On a broader scale, inefficiency within any part of the health system is likely to deprive certain patients of necessary treatments and health enhancements.

• Despite the evidence that inefficiency is a major problem in many health systems, international comparisons have repeatedly showed that health system in Slovakia tend to be even less effective than heath sectors of OECD/EU countries. In the latest international comparison done with help of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method, authors (Pažitný et al. 2023) confirmed that over the last 20 years, the Slovak healthcare system has scored very poorly in terms of efficiency and was regularly ranked at the bottom of comparisons with other OECD countries (see table below). According to the results of DEA analysis, Slovakia was ranked 26th out of 30 countries in 2020. This is primarily due to very poor results in health indicators, namely life expectancy at birth, infant mortality rate, and potentially lost years of life, both for men and women.

•  In the future, it will be absolutly essential to ensure that, when spending on health care is increased, measures are adopted that will increase its efficiency and lead to an improvement in the health of the population.

• More information: https://healthcareconsulting.sk/en/news/efficiency-healthcare-system-slovakia

Literature:

Cylus L. , Papanicolas I and Smith P.C (2016) Health system efficiency. How to make measurement matter for policy and management. ISBN 978 92 890 5041 Pažitný P., Kandilaki D., Löffler Ľ., Zajac R. (2023) Efektívnosť slovenského zdravotníctva meraná metódou DEA (roky 2000 – 2020) WHO (2000) The World Health Report 2000. Health systems: improving performance. Geneva