Technical efficiency of nursing units in a tertiary care hospital in Taiwan

The variation in productivity and cost efficiency has been observed among 57 nursing units in a large tertiary care hospital. The inefficient units can achieve the same level of efficiency as the efficient units by altering their inputs (either nursing hours or patient costs). The optimization can be achieved through proper reallocations of nursing resources such as nursing hours or costs. However, the resource reallocation to achieve high efficiency should not be at the expense of quality of care. Future efficiency studies should incorporate the nursing sensitive measures of quality in the analysis.