Health care activity and demand model

Past research by the Health Foundation focused on understanding how increased demand was building pressure in the health care system. These pressures have developed through an increase in medical technology, population size and growth in the number of people living with multiple long-term conditions.  

Our publication, Securing the Future, included results from our projection model, which helped inform the five-year funding settlement announced in May 2018. This model projected future health care costs and activity, based on population ageing and changing prevalence of NCDs, as well as issues affecting health care supply such as investment in new hospitals and medical equipment, labour costs and productivity. Each of these factors have direct implications for health care costs and activity, and feed into a range of other policy decisions, from public health to workforce planning.   

Continuing this challenging research area, the REAL Centre is working in partnership with the NCD Prevention and Food Policy Research Group at the University of Liverpool. This ambitious project, set for at least three years, will build on this work by focusing on the incidence and prevalence of chronic conditions and other NCDs and the associated health care costs, now and in the future. 

We will be developing a microsimulation model to understand how trends in risk factors (such as smoking and diet) affect prevalence of chronic conditions, and to explore the impact of policies to reduce risk factors. As well as producing projections for health care demand, our work on this project will help provide data on trends in the incidence and prevalence of chronic conditions, and how chronic conditions drive health care activity and costs across different points of delivery. We will study variability in health care activity, costs and patient outcomes to help us understand what drives this variation, including the features of well-managed care.