Performance and Capacity Evaluation of the Spanish Health System in SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic

Production Economics models have been used in the last decades as decision support tools for the performance evaluation of such systems, leading to expressive managerial benefits. In this paper, we address a performance evaluation of the Spanish health system in response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, observing the pressure on this country's health system, and considering an estimated hospitalization rate. we present a DEA model output-oriented to measure the capacity and capacity utilization to calculate the need for these resources (doctors, nurses, and beds) in the presence of a pandemic. Besides, we simulate a reduction in slacks for each autonomous community, showing the volume of resources that started to be better utilized from the increase in demand. The results indicate that coordinated actions to expand the system's capacity can be presented, we identified the number of nurses as a critical entry. If this entry is not adequately sized, the health care system may collapse in the short term. The methodology is flexible and can be used from the perspective of exogenous shocks in the health system. The expansion policies in the health system were observed as a parsimonious model and with few contributions, since the health system uses relative numbers of ideal amounts of devices for professionals.