Health and Social Planning

The title of my paper may seem to promise more than I will be able to offer the honourable participants of this conference. I am a physician without a sociological background. As the years go by I miss this kind of education more and more. I have devoted over thirty years of my professional work to epidemiology and to combatting communicable diseases in various conditions, in various countries and in various periods of peace and war. During the last twenty years I have been mainly involved in the organization of health care and the administration of the health service. The evolution of my work has undoubtedly been responsible for reinforcing my feeling that there is a growing need for cooperation between sociologists and the health service. The need for such cooperation originated primarily from failures in the implementation of certain disease control programmes and difficulties in the organization of prevention, treatment and rehabilitation. The organizer of health care works under the continuous pressure of the health needs of the population. Therefore the solution of individual problems does not bring him relief, as each problem solved is followed by a new one expecting solution. Despite the increasing number of health service employees: physicians, nurses and a whole range of other professions, despite the great number of newly built hospitals, sanatoria, institutions for chronic patients, out-patient clinics, health centres and centres for social and occupational rehabilitation, the scope of the population’s health needs is not decreasing but changing and progressing. The health service is aware of this and this is the way how the situation is evaluated by the population demanding still broader range of health services representing higher and higher standards.