Capacity planning
Hospital Operations
Definition. Capacity planning is the process of deciding the amount, type and timing of resources, such as staff, beds, equipment, rooms and appointment slots, that a health service needs to meet expected demand with acceptable waiting, cost and quality.
Explanation
An early review of capacity management in health services separated decisions about facilities and equipment from decisions about the workforce and scheduling, and classified the operations research models that support each (Smith-Daniels et al., 1988). A later taxonomy arranged resource capacity planning and control decisions on two axes: the hierarchical level of the decision (strategic, tactical, operational) and the type of care service, such as ambulatory, emergency, surgical, inpatient, home and residential care (Hulshof et al., 2012).
Good capacity planning rests on demand forecasts and on queueing logic: planning for average demand at very high utilisation guarantees queues whenever demand varies. In oncology, the unit of capacity differs between chemotherapy chairs and nurse hours, linear accelerator sessions, operating theatre time and bed-days, and the workforce often sets the effective capacity of each, as discussed in the chapter on workforce, workload and capacity management.
Related concepts
Bed occupancy Queueing theory Discrete-event simulation Forecasting
Read on The Health Topics
- Workforce, Workload and Capacity Management in the Oncology Hospital: An Introduction (101)
- The Capacity Problem in Oncology and How to Solve It
- Managing an Oncology Hospital as a System: Patient Journey, Process, Bottleneck and Capacity
- Optimisation Under Uncertainty, from Operations to Health Management: Concepts, Approaches, Evidence and Worked Problems
References
Hulshof, P. J. H., Kortbeek, N., Boucherie, R. J., Hans, E. W., & Bakker, P. J. M. (2012). Taxonomic classification of planning decisions in health care: A structured review of the state of the art in OR/MS. Health Systems, 1(2), 129–175. https://doi.org/10.1057/hs.2012.18
Smith-Daniels, V. L., Schweikhart, S. B., & Smith-Daniels, D. E. (1988). Capacity management in health care services: Review and future research directions. Decision Sciences, 19(4), 889–919. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5915.1988.tb00310.x
Cite this entry: Kurutkan, M. N. (2026). Capacity planning. In The Health Topics glossary. https://healthtopic.org/glossary/capacity-planning/
Articles that discuss this concept
6 articles on The Health Topics use this concept. The list updates as new articles are published.
- Workforce, Workload and Capacity Management in the Oncology Hospital: An Introduction (101) 5
- Optimisation Under Uncertainty, from Operations to Health Management: Concepts, Approaches, Evidence and Worked Problems 3
- Appointment Scheduling: Theory, Methods, Health Service Applications and the Turkish Context 2
- Predictive Quality: An Introduction 101 1
- Developing a Monte Carlo Simulation-Based Decision Support Tool for Patient Sequencing Optimisation in Health Services: A Methodological Study 1
- Resource, Quality and Data-Driven Management in the Oncology Hospital: An Introduction (101) for Physicians 1