BackgroundHealth systems aim to provide a range of services to meet the growing demand of Dubai's heathcare system aims to provide a range of services to meet the growing demand of its population health needs and to ensure that standards of easy access, quality, equity and responsiveness are maintained. Dubai Health Authority (DHA) uses health services planning tools to assess the health needs of its population and sets priorities and effective regulatory strategies to achieve equilibrium of supply and demand of healthcare services and ensure adequate healthcare services are available, in terms of both quality and quantity. This study aims to measure the gap between demand and supply in health care services in Dubai at the baseline and to forecast the gap size and type (according to medical specialty, key medical planning units and geographical area) till 2030. The specific consequential aim includes identification of appropriate strategic directions for regulation, licensing, policies, insurance.MethodologyThe supply of healthcare services, professionals and medical equipment is captured through a census of all healthcare facilities licensed for practice in the Emirate of Dubai. The demand is estimated using a need based approach, where demand for episodes of medical care are estimated by age and gender and aligned to the internationally defined diagnosis related groups (IR-DGRs). The estimated episodes are then forecasted into the future, until 2030, using three scenarios of population growth (high, medium and low) for the emirate of Dubai. The captured supply and forecasted demand has been categorized into eight key health-planning units (KPUs) to allow for understanding of the population healthcare service needs by main service categories. Using a software for health services planning, a gap analysis between supply and demand is conducted till year 2030.ResultsThe results revealed a current and expected undersupply and oversupply for some healthcare services by medical specialty and geographical area of the Emirate. By 2030, the largest gaps exists in acute beds, which would require 1,590 additional beds, for acute-same day beds, an additional 1575 beds, for outpatient consultation rooms, an additional 2,160 consultation rooms, for emergency department, an additional 107 emergency bays, and for long-term care and rehabilitation beds, an additional 675 beds. The top specialty needs for these categories include cardiology, orthopedics, rheumatology, psychiatry, pediatric medicine & surgery, gastroenterology, hematology & oncology, renal medicine, primary care, respiratory medicine, endocrinology, rehabilitation and long-term care.ConclusionsThere is an existing and growing requirement to support the healthcare services capacity needs for the top service lines and geographical areas with the largest gaps. Future licensing is required to ensure that new facilities are geographically distributed in a balanced way, and requests for licensing that create or augment oversupply should be avoided.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12913-023-09401-y.