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OPERATIONS RESEARCH IN PUBLIC HEALTH |
Stig Andersen: Indian J Public Health 1963, 7, 141-51. |
The research which is foremostly needed in the
poor countries of the world is not inventive and experimental research;
the demand of these societies is no longer for new techniques and
new inventions to improve their human material. Their demand is
for systems composed of largely known techniques which could improve
the human material to a level they can now afford and give the optimal
utilisation of scarce economic resources. Research that satisfies
this demand can be called application research or operations
research. The term Operations Research has been borrowed from
certain other fields i.e., military and industry. The techniques
have mainly been developed during the second world war military
field operations and later on applied in the field of industrial
management. The spectacular progress of public health in the developed
countries during the last century was a result of interaction mainly
between economic progress and the development of science and not
as a result of application of operations research. Over a period
of time a very large number of inventions and experiences in techniques
are available to apply in logical systems. This relative preponderance
of technical knowledge over economic capacity is the social fact
and many developing countries cannot choose the best and have to
depend upon the utilisation of operations research in public health.
The following are the major seven phases in Operations
Research applied to Public Health Services: i) formulation of the
problem, ii) collection of data, iii) analysis and hypothesis formulation,
iv) deriving solutions from the model, v) choosing the optimal solution
and forecasting results, vi) the test run and the control system,
vii) Recommending implementation. Operations Research can be a continuous
process or even one time effort. For a country like India it could
be a permanent feature of the national health services. The minimum
composition of the Operations Research team is probably a
public health administrator, an epidemiologist, a
mathematician, a statistical and social scientist.
The essence of Operations Research is that logical
thought combined with careful observation and methodological analysis,
which should form the basis of decision making. Operations Research
thus may be called as the science of common sense.
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KEY WORDS: OPERATIONS RESEARCH, PUBLIC HEALTH,
MANAGEMENT, METHODOLOGY. |