Capacity Planning

In this chapter, we discuss some of the modeling methods available for use by health care organizations in determining the level of resources to make available for the delivery of a service or a set of services. We focus mainly on the insights available from different forms of queuing model but discuss also the role of simulation modeling. We then outline the challenges faced in populating capacity planning models with appropriate parameter estimates before closing with some remarks on the non-technical, cultural barriers to effective capacity planning.