Consequence of demographic changes on hospital capacity planning

It is a common belief that ageing society puts increasing burden on health care system. However there are some controversial publications in the literature about how serious this burden is. We examined the problem in context of hospital utilizations. Based on factual utilization data and factual and forecasted age distribution of Hungarian population we propose two approaches to estimate the demographic effect. The standardized approach recalculates the factual data under the assumption that age distribution were fixed to a reference year. Projected approach considers the behavior of health care system to be fixed (based on factual utilization data of the reference years) and calculates the changes due to the demographic changes. Results show that while the overall demographic effect is probably tolerable, a serious redistribution should be expected within care forms and medical specialties.