Research on the pathways of social responsibility of public hospitals based on qualitative comparative analysis / 中华医院管理杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective:To explore the influencing factors and pathways of social responsibility of public hospitals, and to provide a reference for public hospitals in China to further improve the social responsibility level.Methods:From 2019 to 2020, 22 tertiary public hospitals in a region were selected as study cases. The social responsibility score was used as the outcome variable, social benefit, appropriateness, quality, and efficiency were used as the conditional variables, and the qualitative comparative analysis was applied to investigate the combination of conditions affecting social responsibility evaluation of public hospitals.Results:The consistency of the social benefit, appropriateness, and quality was less than 0.9 and greater than 0.8, indicating that they were sufficient and non-necessary conditions for high social responsibility of public hospitals. The consistency of efficiency was 0.747, indicating that it was neither sufficient nor necessary condition. The configuration analysis showed that there were three paths for public hospitals to achieve high social responsibility co-driven social benefit and appropriateness with high quality assistance, co-driven social benefit and efficiency with high quality assistance, and co-driven appropriateness and efficiency, with a coverage rate of 92.6%.Conclusions:Social benefit, appropriateness, quality, and efficiency can be combined in different ways to achieve high social responsibility in public hospitals. Public hospitals could develop targeted social responsibility improvement strategies according to the actual situation, and strengthen the synergy between the elements to improve the level of social responsibility in hospitals.