BOOKS OF RtfiDIfGS - PAHO/WHO

Workshop .- Education in Operational Research and System Analysis
Caracas, Venezuela
March 8-12,1982
I. Introduction and Background
A fundamental component of the World Health Organization's
goal of health for all by the year 2000 is the development and
support o£ .ealth administration programs. To Further this ob-
Jective in Latin America and The Caribbean, a series of workshops
has been sponsored by the Pan American Health Organization (PARO)
and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. These workshops have been con-
cerned with organizational behavior, economics and financing,
evaluation and planning, epidemiology, and administration. This
particular workshop has dealt with the incorporation of Opera-
tions Research and System Analysisltechniques in training and
continuing education programs for healtb systems and hospital
administrators.
This workshop has been motivated by the fact that the health
systems decision maker in Latin America is typically a physician.
At present decisions are generally being made based on subjective
grounds, without the use and, in many cases, the knowledge of
the technic,l tools of operations research and system analysis.
It is only recently that this situation has begun to change as
quantitative methods are being included in both public health
and continuing education curricula.
As late as 1970, health operations research was non-existent
in Latin America. In 1971, PAHO sponsored a symposium on system
Systems analysis and operations research should be broadly
defined as encompassing those quantitative techniques of management
science which can be used to solve real world problems.
These techniques may range from classical industrial engineering
to mathematical programming.