HEALTH CARE PLANNING: STRATEGY AND TACTICS—ENDS AND MEANS

Abstract

Much health and health care planning has been preoccupied with tactical minutiae at the expense of overall strategic thinking. Plans are made for training new types of health care manpower or for designing new laboratories, with no consideration being given to what each is to do, whether it meets a perceived need, or how it is to be related to other modalities of care. Health and health care planning, particularly with respect to resource allocation, is much more a matter of strategy than of tactics; what to do should take precedence over how to do it. A clear ordering of the objectives of a health care system provides a guide to the planning of solutions. Every major objective can be thought of in terms of a set of immediate objectives that are a series of necessary steps towards acheiving that major objective. If immediate objectives are properly formulated and carefully planned, the allocation of resources and the implementation of measures will probably be effective, as immediate objectives are usually more realistic and more easily attainable within a specified time than are higher-level objectives.