Forecasting Patient Needs in a Donor Funded Health Care Project in Kenya

Abstract

Forecasts are crucial for practically all economic and business decisions. The focus of this research paper is in the area of forecasting. The purpose of a forecast is to reduce the range of uncertainty within which management judgements must be made. The research approach adopted is a case study of the Nutrition and HIV Program (NHP), which is a donor funded public health project. The general objective of this study was to forecast the demand for patient needs in a donor funded project. Specifically, this study sought to explain the current method used, determine the factors that influence the selection of forecasting strategy, review and evaluate the accuracy of the current method and establish a more suitable forecasting method that can accurately predict demand for nutrition commodities. The findings from this research provide evidence that forecasts did influence decision making in the key functional areas of the project. Also, that strategy, government and donor policies were the main factors that affected the selection of a forecasting strategy. Further, the review and evaluation of the current forecasting method indicated that there was a significant difference between the actual and forecasted consumption. In order to establish a more suitable forecasting method, Univariate Box – Jenkins (UBJ) methodology was used and two models were tested and Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA (0, 1, 2)) model provided a better fit and was chosen as the model of choice for a short run forecast horizon. The main conclusion drawn from this study is that, UBJ-ARIMA models are useful as benchmarks for forecasting and therefore they should be viewed as complements to a reliable forecasting process. This study recommends that public health projects need to consider adopting business forecasting methods that will provide a better glimpse of the future based on historical events rather than relying on disease morbidity data trends