Abstract
This Chapter uses the language of stocks and flows to represent some generic templates used in modelling the demand and supply of health and social care services. On the demand side, we look at the dynamics of population ageing and health conditions. On the supply side, we show different ways of modelling intervention services and present the beginnings of a taxonomy of these. Understanding how people flow through population ageing chains and health condition chains is important in designing treatment capacity and at which stages it is best to apply this capacity. The simple templates described here will be deployed in a number of the models described in Parts II and III of the book.
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- 1.
In System Dynamics, the term ‘ageing chain’ denotes a broad category of stock/flow structures and the concept may be applied to stocks of materials, not just people.
- 2.
Or is believed not to be reversible; as medical science progresses, conditions once considered irreversible may turn out to be treatable.
- 3.
A key theme of the ‘recovery’ movement, along with ideas that services should be co-produced.
- 4.
This reflects the options available in Stella, the software we use mostly; other possibilities include more ‘object-oriented’ software, such as Ventity.
- 5.
Leaving aside the question why there might be a referral rate if there is no treatment capacity.
- 6.
A Symmetric associate, Angèle Pieters, coined the phrase ‘care or cure’ in a slightly different context (Dutch Perinatal Care), see Pieters (2013).
References
Hirsch, G., & Homer, J. (2016). System dynamics applications to health care in the united states. In R. Meyers (Ed.), Encyclopaedia of complexity and system science. Springer: Berlin, Germany. ISBN 978-0-387-75888-6.
Miller, R., & McKelvie, D. (2016). Commissioning for complexity: exploring the role of system dynamics in social care. London: NIHR.
Pieters, A. J. H. M. (2013). Care and cure: Compete or collaborate? Improving inter-organizational designs in healthcare. A case study in Dutch perinatal care, Tilburg: Center, Center for Economic Research.
Sterman, J. (2018). System dynamics at sixty. System Dynamics Review, 34(1–2), 5–47.
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Wolstenholme, E., McKelvie, D. (2019). The Shape of Illness and the Impact of Interventions . In: The Dynamics of Care. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21878-2_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21878-2_4
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