Abstract

There is serious concern among Canadian healthcare managers about how to respond to our growing demand for healthcare. Recent growth in the demand for healthcare services can be attributed to demographic and socio-economic trends and the increasing rate of technological innovation fuelled by genetics, micro-processing, precision instruments and robotics. Given a limited availability of healthcare resources, questions are now being raised about how to sustain an effective healthcare system and meet the needs of the general population in the current environment. This article explores the drivers of healthcare demand and how they affect demand. It also describes a number of strategies that can and have been used to better align supply and demand, based on models that have emerged from the United States and the United Kingdom - the healthcare rationing model and the consumer-marketing model. The objective is to outline some approaches that can be taken to address this increasingly serious problem.