Public hospitals have come under heavy scrutiny across the world owing to rising expenditures. However, much of the focus has been on cutting down costs to raise efficiency levels. Although not denying the importance of efficiency measures, this article targets a performance issue that is relevant to address the quality of services rendered in public hospitals. Thus, it is important to focus on the effectiveness of resource utilization in these hospitals. Consequently, this article seeks to examine the impact of average length of stay (ALOS) and bed turnover rates (BTR) on bed occupancy rates (BOR).
The Pabon Lasso Model is one of the most important and suitable techniques applied in evaluating the performance of hospitals. The visual representation standardizes the comparative accomplishments of hospitals which information is used by planners in effort to improve productivity of the health care system by use of three pointers namely: (i) Average Length of Stay (ALS); (ii) Bed Occupancy Rate (BOR); (iii) Bed Turnover (BTO). The purpose of this study is to evaluate performance of wards in health centers affiliated to Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) and Ministry of Health (MOH) during the financial year 2012-2013 constructed on Pabon Lasso Model. Data for the nine health centers and two referral hospitals was taken by the nursing sisters who were in charge. To ensure accuracy, a weekly standard report was submitted to head office and the data included: a list of wards, number of beds, admissions, deaths, discharges and inpatient days. For all government health centers and hospitals, overall, the average indicators ALS=3.63 days, BTO= 74.0 times per year and BOR=49.3% were obtained. Based on the Pabon Lasso graph, two wards are in Zone 3, two wards in Zone 4, one ward in Zone 2 and five wards in Zone 1. The performance of health centers and hospitals in Kampala were somehow poor. This represented unacceptable levels of technical deficiency.