Estimate number of hospital beds in the Uk

Question

I'm confused if I should do a top-bottom approach or the bottom top approach. Please see my structure and share your feedback.
1-start with population

2- segment base on age groups (children, middle, old)

3-frequency of vists in each group

4- percentage that will be emitted into hospital to stay for a night or more . ( surgery or baby delivery or just people who are sick and need care)

5- duration of each visit (how many nights will they spend?)

6- add them all up to know demand for hospitals.
7- estimate capacity of one hospital ( don't know how to do that! Please help)

8- divide demand over capacity of one hospital.

please share feedback and suggest any other approach. I feel like my approach is a bit complicated and I would appreciate it if there were any thoughts on how to have a simpler and clearer approach.

Answer 1

Hi there,

This approach absolutely works! I agree that top-down does work well (and would be my preferred option as well)

If you wanted to do bottom-up, basically you'd want to estimate the number of towns, small cities, medium cities, and large cities (London). Then, for each of them, think about how many hostpitals, of what average size (# of beds) and multiply it out!

Answer 2

I think this approach makes sense. To get to the capacity, I would probably flip it around - assume a utilization (incl. spare capacity) to get to the full capacity and scale up demand to total number of beds.

As an example: If you get to 100k hospital bed demand following you steps 1-6, you can estimate a 1/3 spare capacity (or only 2/3 occupied at any given time). Divide 100k over 2/3 and gt to 150k hospital beds.

Answer 3

Hi, in addition to the solution proposed, I would like to suggest similar cases in the platform to practice with:

https://www.preplounge.com/en/consulting-forum/how-much-would-you-charge-to-clean-all-the-windows-in-seattle-4965
https://www.preplounge.com/en/consulting-forum/market-sizing-milk-consumption-5087
https://www.preplounge.com/en/consulting-forum/how-would-you-calculate-the-value-of-a-cow-4982
https://www.preplounge.com/en/consulting-forum/estimate-number-of-traffic-lights-in-a-london-5692

Hope it helps,
Antonello

Answer 4

Hello!

Your approach is really solid!

However, you need quite some detailed data there (e.g., estimation of number of visits that each age group does to the hospital, etc.), for which you should remember to problem-solve with the interviewer.

Hope it helps!

Cheers,

Clara