Economic analysis suggests a number of ways of defining and measuring efficiency. However, this rarely informs measures used in health service management. DEA is applied to data from 75 UK acute hospitals. The results demonstrate the capacity of DEA to produce a user-friendly array of results, based on sound theoretical underpinnings. These range from the measurement of relative efficiencies to quantified suggestions as to how hospitals may improve efficiency, by examining both their own efficiency and that of comparable units.
Information is provided both about individual hospitals and the sample as a whole.
DEA is also able to distinguish between hospitals demonstrating differing returns to scale. Our findings suggest that, although still very much under development, DEA is usable and, given the weakness of current means of measuring efficiency in the National Health Service, that DEA has a strong claim for further consideration. Development of a program for evaluating training outputs 565 . Sixth Annual Conference on Interactive Instruction Delivery and Third Annual Conference on Learning Technology in the Health Care Sciences, Orlando, CA, USA 24-26 Feb. 1988 . Although DEA techniques have not been widely used for training efficiency analysis, the methodology, based on linear programming procedures, has been demonstrated to be valid in situations where decision-making units with varied inputs and outputs must be evaluated.