Performance comparisons of organ transplantation centers in Turkey with data envelopment analysis

The purpose of this study is to conduct a survey of performance comparisons between 64 Organ Transplant Centres under the Ministry of Health, and 57 Transplant Centres which carry out Kidney Transplants using Data Envelopment Analysis.The data in this study is from the year 2011, and it was analyzed by means of Data Envelopment Analysis using 4 variable inputs (the number of Coordinators, the number of patients waiting for Kidney Transplants and the number of beds with ventilators) and 1 variable output (the total number of Kidney Transplant operations carried). The primary objective of this study is to increase the number of Kidney Transplant operations being carried out at the Centres. In our analysis, it is resulted that there are reference centres for each transplantation center and the results change relatively according to the reference centres. For example, this result is found appropriate that the reference centre of Akdeniz University Faculty of Medicine Hospital Transplantation Centre is Antalya Medicalpark Hospital and the variable output should increase the number of Kidney Transplantation from 311 to 513; variable inputs should decrease the number of patients from 637 to 317 and make use of 40 beds out of 56 effectively.When examined performance comparison, the number of activity and the value of activity of the Transplantation Centres, the result is that there are two centres; Private Antalya Medicalpark Hospital Transplantation Centre with 48 activities comes in first and Private International Hospital İstanbul Transplantation Center comes in second.The Data Envelopment Analysis and the performance comparisons between Transplant Centres were interpreted using the Win4Deap Programme.Key words: Transplantation, Data Envelopment Analysis, Performance