In the region, there is a need to predict the necessary number of paediatric beds. Paediatric discharge data from the 1994-95 Lorraine regional database of Anonymous Discharge Summaries (ADS) are used for this study. We analyse the concentration and specialisation of the hospital activity types and we estimate the numbers of paediatric beds needed for the year 2,000. For the same percentage of the case-mix by hospital group, concentration of the activity is more important in the small District General Hospital (DGH) than in the Teaching Hospital (TH). In the most important Medical Diagnosis Categories (MDC), the case-mix variation by age class can't be characterised inside of the MDC group. The different methods we use to estimate the need of paediatric beds, give similar estimations for the year 2,000.