The network consolidations are the area-based health system management that allows flexibility in health workforce reallocation to correspond the needs of population health within local administrative-area network areas at the district, provincial, or health-region levels.
This study considers network consolidations from different hospital classifications:
1. All hospital levels
2. Only the same hospital level
3. Similar hospital levels
3.1) Type A: {Primary and First-level Secondary} and {Mid-level Secondary, High-level Secondary, and Tertiary}
3.2) Type B: {Primary, First-level Secondary, and Mid-level Secondary} and {High-level Secondary and Tertiary}
The area-based network simulation is developed to quantify the hospital output and allocated to health workforce within the network. This approach is an application of gatekeeper concept to manage resources in according to the demand for health care service and the workforce supply capacity within each network.
The analysis compares workload per worker between (a) the hospital-level averages (status quo) and (b) the area-based network averages after consolidations at different administrative-area levels (ex-ante).
The key concept to measure output in this study is the weighted aggregation of medical treatment cases, where weights are the average medical costs incurred in the same hospital level. The hospital output is defined as the aggregation of the medical treatment cases weighted with the corresponding average costs.
This concept used to measure output is the case mix index (CMI) which provide reference for the standard inpatient costs for the diagnosis related group (DRG) as the adjusted relative weight (adjRW) [23]. However, this study directly calculated the average costs for outpatient and inpatient treatments with the regression analysis at different five hospital levels. But the same concept applies for both outpatient and inpatient cases to reflect the relative resource allocated for each discharge. Thus, the outpatient and inpatient cases can be weighted and aggregated as the hospital or network outputs.
The average costs of each treatment case are determined from the relevant attributes such as principal diagnosis (PDx), sex and age of patients, service time, service type, insurance type, total number of days admitted (only inpatient treatments), hospital, and health region. The cost regression functions which assign a relative value to each medical treatment case are calculated separately for outpatient and inpatient services at five different hospital levels. More details are available in Table S1 of Supplementary Material.
For the input factor, this study considers numbers of health workers by different professions, which are weighted by average hourly earnings and average work hours per week. Thus, the aggregation of the weighted numbers of health workers is the total workforce of hospitals or area-based networks.
The workload per worker is calculated from total output divided by total workforce. The workload per worker is then normalized by the average cost for outpatient treatments at the primary hospitals. Therefore, the results of average workload per worker are comparable using the same measurement unit as the numbers of outpatient cases from the primary-level health care service. Lastly, this study compares workload per worker for the hospital-level before network consolidations (status quo) and the network consolidations at different administrative-area levels (ex-ante).
Data
Numbers of each medical profession such as doctor, nurse, dentist, pharmacist, and other medical professions are the hospital-level data from the Human Resource Management Division of the Office of the Permanent Secretary, the MOPH.
The case-based data from the Information and Communication Technology Center of the MOPH covers principal diagnosis (PDx), sex, age, service time (office hours or after hours), service type (walk-in, referral, etc.), insurance type (Universal Coverage Scheme, Civil Servant Medical Benefit Scheme, Social Security Scheme, and others), total number of days admitted (inpatient treatments only), and costs of each treatment case.
The average hourly earnings and work hours per week of each medical profession are calculated from the Labor Force Survey (LFS) 2001Q1 to 2018 Q1 of the National Statistical Office. The regression functions of hourly earnings and work hours per week controlled for heterogeneity in age, gender, education, urban and rural areas, and province. The estimated hourly earnings and work hours per week are fixed at the year 2018. The hourly earnings were adjusted by temporal and spatial deflators. The health workers are selective by the ISCO-88 codes for the workers aged 15–64 employed in the public sector. The weights as adjustment factors are reported in Table S2 of Supplementary Material.