Background: Kuwait overall health expenditure, in 2019, was 5.5% from the gross-domestic product and the state is the biggest healthcare provider in secondary and tertiary hospitals. Hospital efficiency and productivity are, therefore, an important issue to analyse, specifically in terms of number of visits to outpatient clinics, the number of surgical procedures performed, bed turnover and bed occupancy. Data envelopment analysis has been used to provide insights in the understanding of this growth in other countries. Methods: Data envelopment analysis (DEA) was used to estimate technical and scale efficiency scores for seventeen public hospitals in Kuwait from 2015 to 2019 using a two-stage DEA. Technical efficiency scores were regressed against institutional characteristics using Tobit regression to investigate the determinants of efficiency differences amongst hospitals. Results: The mean technical efficiency score for all hospitals was 75%, and it improved by 1% since 2015. The...
