Managing demand for secondary care services: the changing context

This is the last of five articles on ways of managing demand for health care

Little strong evidence exists to explain the sustained growth in demand for hospital services shown in the table, but changes in population structure, numbers of people living alone, pressures on primary care, risk management, patient expectations, and an increased ability to treat are frequently cited as possible reasons for this seemingly inexorable rise.1

The desire to reduce, or at least contain, demand in the hospital sector is undoubtedly related to this growth and to the need to control costs. There is also a concern about the appropriateness of hospital care for many conditions, and there are growing opportunities to provide modes of care which may better meet patients' needs and may, in some circumstances, be cheaper.

The previous paper in this series discussed demand management at the interface between primary care and secondary care. Attempts to segment primary and secondary care are inevitably somewhat artificial. figure 1, however, shows a highly simplified representation of the relation over time between the natural progression of a chronic illness and the thresholds between different healthcare sectors.

Below a certain degree of severity (threshold A) a patient's condition can be managed …