Capacity Pooling in Health Care Systems – A Conceptual Analysis

• The Swedish healthcare system is being challenged by a continuously increasing demand for care, while there is a lack of capacity. The use of temporary agency staff has been increasing for the past years, even though that is a short-term solution that generates high costs and can lead to impaired patient safety and deteriorating work environment. A measure to reduce the cost of temporary agency staff is to replace agency staff with less costly internal staffing agency in order to maintain the flexibility that such capacity pools create in staff planning. A capacity pool is a general capacity that can be allocated to parts of the system where the existing workload and demand for capacity is unusually high. Therefore, the use of internal capacity pools is a method to improve capacity utilisation of current resources, which is particularly important for bottlenecks in the system (i.e. physicians and nurses). From a theoretical perspective, there are several types of advantages that can be achieved with capacity pooling. However, there is a lack of systematic research on the support of the implementation of internal capacity pools in healthcare systems. Little is known about what benefits and costs that can be expected, how they can be organised, their structure and size, and their impact on healthcare performance. This paper investigates the conceptual benefits with reducing dependence on temporary agency staff in healthcare systems and replacing them with internal staffing pools and presents a planned empirical research project in the field. For instance, the use of internal capacity pools is a mean towards a more effective matching of demand with current resources and can thereby be used as a tool to improve capacity utilisation. In addition, the use of capacity pools can contribute to an enhanced work environment due to the possibility to meet large variations in demand, and thereby reduce variations in workload and overtime work.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv -- Företagsekonomi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business -- Business Administration (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Flexibility

Capacity Pooling

Health Care Systems

Conceptual Analysis

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)