RESUMEN
Providing the population with the necessary bed stock is an important task of public health. In order to compare the level of security and the population's need for hospital beds in the territory of the Federal districts of Russia, the study used the following methods: analytical, logical and descriptive statistics. Data on the population and bed Fund were taken from the official reports of Rosstat and the Ministry of health of Russia for 2016-2018. The population's need for hospital beds was calculated as the ratio of the product of the number of bed days per 1000 inhabitants and the population to the average annual bed occupancy multiplied by 1000. In the course of the study, the dynamics of the reduction of the bed stock in various profiles was identified and the population's need for hospital beds was determined, taking into account various variants of the population forecast. It was found that the optimization of hospital beds, in addition to economic interests, should be considered opportunities for providing outpatient and inpatient care, improve efficiency and quality of hospital care, as well as the necessity of forming a reserve of hospital beds in case of mass sanitary losses or increase the level of hospitalization of citizens in a short period of time.