CRITICAL PROBLEMS IN HEALTH PLANNING: Potential Management Contributions.

The purpose of this paper is to summarize critical problems identified by Health Planners and to suggest that management scholarship has considerable potential as a perspective for analysis of developmental efforts in health service planning. In particular, the managerial lessons from aerospace, venture management and corporate planning need to be related to this important societal area. It is not my purpose to end this paper with a clarian call for members of the Academy of Management to don white medical robes and take prophylactic theories to save disease ridden health planning agencies. What management theory has, at best, is a partial perspective. Public planning for health deals with a much more fragmented and product differentiated world than the corporate or aerospace world. However, coordinated, developmental, large-scale planning has been longer established and much more highly funded in the private corporate sector, and in the quasi-public aerospace sector, than in health, urban planning or social service planning. The lessons we have learned elsewhere should be shared with new planning endeavors in these public agencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]