Building a model by the NHS, for the NHS
Forecasting future hospital activity and the left shift of care ADRUK 2025
2025-08-29
The New Hospital Programme (NHP) Demand Model
- An award-winning, fully open source model for estimating future hospital activity
- Used for local hospital planning and to inform national policy
The model in a nutshell
![Flow chart of the NHP model]()
Probabilistic Monte Carlo simulation model, providing hundreds of possible futures and an average forecast
HES: a powerful dataset
- Model data: 500 million anonymised patient records
- Significant data wrangling and infrastructure changes required to process data on this scale
- All code for data processing is openly available - this ensures we’re all using the same definitions
92 Categories of potentially mitigable activity
| Prevention and public health |
Smoking Related Admissions |
| Redirection of activity |
A&E Frequent Attenders |
| De-adoption of activities |
Interventions with Limited Evidence |
| Efficiencies |
Outpatient Convert to Tele-Attendance |
Creation of new datasets
- Elicitation exercise showing what activity mitigation experts think might be possible in the future
- Model users’ inputs are a helpful insight into what providers think is possible in the future
- Counts of activity that is potentially mitigable at a local/regional/national level
- Inequalities in planned hospital procedures
New datasets in use
![Three graphs side by side; the title is Projected beddays compared to baseline of 55 million in 2022/23. the ambitious graph shows a decrease in activity to 46.6 million. The steady graph shows an increase in activity to 76.8 million. The Planned graph shows an increase in activity to 63.5 million.]()
Future ambitions
- 🔓 Sharing our datasets
- 🗺️ Interactive apps to help users explore and understand our datasets
- 🔭 Continuing to support local hospital planning and national policy
