A review and synthesis of demand management, capacity management and performance in health‐care services

Abstract

Responses to demand uncertainty in the field of health-care services is a very timely research issue because of ongoing changes in demand patterns that are driven by demographics and recent changes in the delivery of these services. Despite its importance to researchers, the literature on demand management, capacity management and performance in health care has not been extensively reviewed. The present paper addresses this need by analyzing and synthesizing 463 articles published between 1986 and 2006. The key contributions of this work are the analysis and synthesis of research on demand management, capacity management and performance, along with an agenda to guide future research in this important area.

The Nature and Necessity of Operational Flexibility in the Emergency Department

“…However, costs of flexibility can be reduced by conceiving of flexibility in more creative ways (e.g., cross-training that has staff trained in multiple tasks versus adding staff). 17 Although cross-training may itself be cost-prohibitive where advanced training is required – e.g., additional degrees or schooling – it may be especially useful for tasks like performing electrocardiograms, patient re-evaluations, performing discharges, or taking vital signs.…”

Simulation Modelling in Healthcare: An Umbrella Review of Systematic Literature Reviews

“…Table 2 presents the remaning 16 reviews which present multiple types of applications and the classification of the applications of simulation studies, within those articles [7,8,12,14,16,18,20,22,25,27,28,33,34,36,37,39]. The numbers of simulation studies relating to the different application groups were identified and extracted from the sixteen reviews.…”

“…Jack et al [12] Review of demand management, capacity management and performance in healthcare services…”

“…No. of studies identified [7] (n= 93) [8] (n= 182) [12] (n= 463) [14] (n= 168) [16,18] (n= 201) [20] (n= 75) [22] (n= 70) [25] (n= 98) [27] (n= 142) [28] (n= 74) [33] (n= 117) [34] (n= 6) [36] (n= 97) [37] (n= 106) [39] (n= 232) …”

Integrated decision making in healthcare : an operations research and management science perspective

“…Table 3.1 displays our search method. To identify the search terms as listed in Appendix 3.11.2 and to create the basic structure of the planning decision hierarchy for each care service, we consulted available literature reviews [49,59,61,74,84,89,99,166,182,183,224,228,229,271,282,287,289,304,336,351,363,368,393,399,404,410,413,451,452,479,491] and books [62,231,312,361,387,503]. Additional search terms were obtained from the index of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) [362] and available synonyms.…”