Abstract

The economic recession generated by the world financial crisis with implications on the extreme need of funding, the existence of a complex and more dynamic environment, characterized by various actors’ interaction, development of knowledge within the field, technological progress and quality of service offer impose the identification of alternatives to improve performance within the public healthcare system. These are the coordinates that have driven our empirical research concerning the manner of perceiving the public-private partnership into the public hospitals from Romania. The study has bidimensional approach. The first part takes into account a synthesis of the ideas on this topic published into the professional literature and of the regulations issued by the national regulators. The second part is an empirical survey based on a questionnaire to which we have received answers from the public hospitals in Romania. All respondents consider that the public-private partnership improves the public hospitals’ performance regardless of the number of beds, number of patients, indicator of case complexity, average time of waiting for a surgery, value of expenses per ward. Although the public-private partnership is not regulated for the public healthcare system, we consider that at present, its development within the healthcare system from Romania is the manner of ensuring the continuity of the medical service offer, limitating the depreciation of their quality and thus, maintaining and improving the performance of public hospitals. 

Key words: Public-private partnership, public hospital, performance, cost, quality.