Demand and capacity management (DCM) is widely researched in operational management, e.g. in sales and operations planning (Thomé, 2012). Interest and use of DCM rapidly spreading in Sweden’s public healthcare sector (Myrberg et al., 2024), supported by the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare, and in other developed countries (see e.g. Lilly et al., 2024). Naturally, interest in predicting, planning, and managing demand gained increased attention following the covid-19 pandemic (see e.g. Lorenzen and Schwartz, 2021). Prior studies in DCM have focused on specific patient journey aspects (Allder et al., 2010), various planning levels (Larsson and Fredriksson, 2019), and conceptual frameworks (Visser et al., 2001) however, interest is now expanding across healthcare levels.

On the demand side, aging populations resulting in a rise in multi-morbidity and people with chronic diseases pose significant challenges (Briggs et al., 2018; Rijken et al., 2017), while on the capacity side, staffing, beds, and financial constraints are major concerns (Rosenbäck and Svensson, 2023). Research indicates that even small-scale DCM implementations in healthcare can lead to significant improvements in less mature organizations (Plantin and Johansson, 2012) for example to increase access and improve patient flow effectiveness, lower costs and improve quality. 

Multiple definitions of production planning exist in healthcare, and no universally accepted definition exists. Instead, terms such as “capacity planning” or “capacity planning and control” are used (Slack et al., 2010). In this paper, demand and capacity management (DCM) is defined as the overarching concept, covering the process from strategic planning to daily operations. 

Efforts to synthesize current research on DCM in healthcare are limited and some notable exceptions focus on a narrow scope, such as emergency departments (McCaughey et al., 2015) or the covid-19 pandemic (Klein et al., 2022). Unlike previous reviews, this study has an integrated approach, considering demand and capacity management as two interdependent concepts. The purpose of this paper is twofold. Firstly, to investigate the current state of DCM in healthcare and to theoretically identify improvement initiatives to deal with capacity problems. Secondly, to present healthcare managers´ views of the implementation of DCM in a Swedish context and present some suggestions, from a practical point of view, of how the work with DCM can be improved.