Shaping the future of health institutions in Canada.

: The development of the Health Institutions of the Future Forum will represent an important innovation in health planning in Canada. With every major planing decision, especially related to health institutions, there are many uncertainties. Some of these uncertainties are due to lack of time or resources required to gather information from economic, medical technological, and administrative research sources. Other uncertainties are due to lack of information about what is happening now (and in Canada, our data problems, though slowly being remedied, often lead us to resort to best guesses or judgements. Finally the remaining uncertainty is due to lack of ability to divide the future. The latter cannot be entirely remedied by better observation or measurement, but the degree of uncertainty can be estimated using varied reasonable assumptions about how driving forces may change. Once established, the Health Institutions of the Future Forum will aim to improve decision-makers' access to available information and to help them understand the range of uncertainty in the future. The Forum represents an important organisational adaptation to change and to specialisation. People from several different sectors have come together better to prepare for the future. Their cooperative and creative spirit combined with incisive research and analysis could become an important impetus for change on the Canadian health scene.