Redeployment and Replacement of Physicians and Nurses between Health Regions in Saudi Arabia Using Data Envelopment Analysis

The problem which Ministry of health in Saudi Arabia is facing now is that, if a given Region (Ri) is capable of producing outputs (Inpatients and outpatients) with inputs (Physicians, Nurses), then other Region should also be able to do the same, if they were to operate efficiently to meet the strategic plans that has been stated by Ministry of healths policy makers for each and every (20) health Regions located in Saudi Arabia. This creates the problem of how can we rank the efficient health Regions over their inefficient counterpart. This question leads to the importance of redistribution of physicians and Nurses between Health Regions in Saudi Arabia with an objective to show variation in terms of efficiency of health sector services in Saudi Arabia, and in turn it encourages the two researchers to better understand competition between these (20) Health Regions in Saudi Arabia in terms of human resource allocation, and how to make improvement for inefficient Regions in terms of redistribution and replacement of Non-Saudi physicians and nurses by Saudi citizens. The results revealed that there is an excess of (4653) Physicians and (15408) nurses in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and proved that decision making policies of increasing the Physicians (including dentists) by 28.3 % and Nurses by ( 57 %) when comparing the year (2015) to the a year (2016) is not correct. Therefore, we recommended that all these excesses of physicians and nurses in the inefficient Health Regions must be redeployed to the efficient (6) Regions or to be replaced by Saudi (physicians and nurses) citizens.