The future of health planning

What is the future of health planning? Will the profession survive? What will health planners be doing thirty years from now? The answers to these questions depend in part on prognostication and in part on the collective will of the profession to shape its own destiny. You ought to be doing something about the future in addition to waiting around for it. If by nature you are impatient for the good life, don't wait for it--invent it. The science of design is the sovereign science of the 21st century. A design for health requires us to answer three questions: (1) What should be done? (values) (2) How can it be done? (knowledge) (3) Who can do it? (power) To the degree health planners help society in its search for answers to these three questions, it will secure its own future as a profession. To the degree it fails in this quest, it will continue in its current mechanistic preoccupations and will eventually pass into irrevelance and obscurity. The impact of twenty-four societal trends are projected, as are the effects of the trends on the health planning profession and the images of its practitioners.