Framework
Capacity Economics
What an institution can do with what it has, what trade-offs it makes, and what evidence advocates need to make a structural case for doing things differently.
The question
Institutions serving complex populations with stretched resources face a specific problem: conventional investment cases struggle to take into consideration the full range of outcomes, the value of tradeoffs, and what is gained or lost when planning and making changes. This makes it difficult to prioritize and make the right kinds of decisions. Capacity Economics is a framework for holding multiple outcome dimensions together, so that the full case for adequate resourcing can be made and defended.
The work is currently most developed in northern Canadian healthcare, where multifactorial chronic disease, geographic dispersion, and care models that are labour-intensive by design make per-visit metrics unreliable guides to what actually matters. The same logic applies to mental health systems, addictions care, palliative care, and other settings where the value of adequate capacity is borne out through prevented harm rather than through per-unit throughput.
The questions we are aiming to answer
What does standard care cost, across clinical complications, southbound travel, life years, and quality of life? This is the baseline.
What changes when a designed care model is applied? How do outcomes shift across clinical, system, workforce, equity, and economic dimensions?
How much of the value sits in travel that doesn't have to happen, in complications that don't occur, in years of life that aren't lost?
What does prevention compound to over ten years, and why does conventional annual budgeting systematically undervalue it?
The work in progress
A tool built to hold these questions together — the Population Capacity Planner — is being developed through a current piece of work in northern Canada. Posts on Capacity Economics and the northern work are developing through The Public Goods.
Read the first Capacity Economics post →Working on a similar question?
If you are building an investment case for a care model or staffing change and the conventional math is producing the wrong answer, I would be glad to hear from you.
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