PRODUCTIVITY ANALYSIS OF PUBLIC HOSPITALS IN CAMEROON: A MALMQUIST PRODUCTIVITY INDEX APPROACH.

The study employed the Malmquist Productivity Index to analyze the productivity of public hospitals in Cameroon. The main advantage of this approach is that it does not impose any specification on the production technique and does not require input prices like other techniques. Productivity was decomposed into its usual constituents of productivity growth: technological change and efficiency change. The results show on average that Cameroonian hospitals did not experience productivity growth during the period analyzed and this was due to technical regress. Integrated health centres were more productive than Sub Divisional Medical Centres and District Hospitals respectively while hospitals located in Urban areas achieved higher productivity scores than those in Semi-urban and Rural areas respectively.Productivity can be improved by providing more training courses to employees and also improving the working conditions of the personnel, designing good reward and punishment systems for employees since most of them tend to take jobs in multiple health facilities due to low pay and tend to focus less in their public hospitals.