A hospital capacity planning model

Current health reforms mean that the Royal Hampshire Hospital, like many others, needs to examine its use of resources very carefully. In particular, it has to understand how various casemix combinations impact on the way resources are used and attempt to define feasible packages of care. Previously, the hospital was funded on a fixed budget and was forced to constrain its costs within this event if that meant slowing down or stopping elective work. The new arrangements require the hospital to bid competitively for agreed volumes of workload. Two of the many issues raised by the new system are the need for an accurate knowledge of the day to day capacity of the hospital and the behaviour of the hospital system under different case-mixtures. The model described in this article attempts to address this problem of capacity.