Title: Mathematical challenges to modelling home and community care

In British Columbia (BC) Home and Community Care (HCC) services provide a range of health care and support services for British Columbians with palliative or rehabilitative health care needs. Almost 80% of HCC clients are senior citizens (aged 65 and older), and the most recent population projections suggest that the senior population of BC will double in the next twenty years. In this talk we examine some mathematical challenges that arise in developing forecasting models to explore the future of HCC in BC. In particular, we address the issue of how health care usage and age are not easily related, and the issue of non-publicly funded HCC options. We discuss Derivative Free Optimization played a key role in the development of a deterministic multi-state Markov model of the HCC system that was recently developed for the BC Ministry of Health.