Abstract
BackgroundThe concept of care for people in a critical or even terminal health condition, who are in the last stage of their life, has become the mission of palliative care facilities. Therefore, the life of a sick patient poses a number of challenges for health care services to make sure that medical services are tailored to the trajectory of the disease, as well as the various needs, preferences and resources of patients and their families.MethodsHealth systems financed from public funds need to adopt new methods of management to meet the high and arising demand for a long-term care. There are several ways of assessing the demand for long-term care services. The method recommended by the author and presented in more detail in this paper is the one relying on grey systems, which enables the estimation of forecasting models and, finally, actual forecasts of the number of potential future patients.ResultsGST can be used to make predictions about the future behaviour of the system, which is why this article aims to present the possibility of using the first-order grey model GM (1,1) in predicting the number of patients of palliative care facilities in Poland. The analysis covers the data from 2014 to 2019, whereas the prediction of the number of patients has been additionally formulated for 2020.ConclusionsHealth systems, particularly publicly funded ones, are characterised by a certain kind of incompleteness and uncertainty of data on the structure and behaviour of its individual components (e.g. potential patients or payers). The present study aims to prove how simple and effective grey systems models are in the decision-making process.
Highlights
The concept of care for people in a critical or even terminal health condition, who are in the last stage of their life, has become the mission of palliative care facilities
Grey systems modelling in the assessment of demand for hospice services in Poland In order to present grey modelling and its usefulness for estimating demand for long-term care, an attempt was made to forecast only the realised demand for hospice services in Poland, which is due to the lack of public data on, e.g. the number of patients waiting for such services
Demand modelling involved the use of the GM (1,1) grey system to estimate the equations forecasting the patient numbers for the aforementioned 16 regions and, to provide forecasts for 2015–2020
Summary
The concept of care for people in a critical or even terminal health condition, who are in the last stage of their life, has become the mission of palliative care facilities. According to the WHO definition, palliative care comprises all activities aimed at improving the quality of life for patients and their families coping with an illness (usually a terminal one), through the prevention and relief of suffering and treatment of pain and other physical, psychosocial and spiritual problems [1] Such a holistic approach to the patient, incorporating most aspects of living in the human environment, paradoxically paved the way to seeing death and the process of dying as a natural and inevitable stage of the life cycle, while preparing the patient and their relatives for its arrival has evolved into an important aim of palliative care facilities and hospices. The life of a sick patient poses a number of challenges for health care services to make sure that medical services are tailored to the trajectory of the disease, as well as the various needs, preferences and resources of patients and their families
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
