[Human resource programming and management: the experience of the French Veterinary Services]

France has been endeavouring to come up with veterinary activity indicators by which measure the work of public Veterinary Services and to rationalise the geographical distribution of staff and financial ressources on the basis of objective criteria. An analysis of activities in 1998, and of new missions, has made it possible to: define criteria against which the tasks accomplished by the various divisions can be measured; prepare a method for establishing optimal distribution criteria for the human resources available; propose, for each département, the allocation of human resources based on national distribution criteria but taking into account the individual needs of different areas; measure variations in activity resulting from new or modified missions, with a priori theoretical assessments (impact studies), and a posteriori control. In each départment, the Direction générale de I'alimentation (DGAL) has adopted an ongoing management tool composed of: a national database quantifying the activities of its services in real time, a simulation tool, to calculate the human resources needs for the local units.