Issues in health plan development: a critique of the guidelines for plan development under PL 93-641.

The draft guidelines for development of health systems plans and annual implementation plans represent a logical, coherent integration of the best of currently available planning concepts and methods. However, there are at least six major areas in which the current state of the art is clearly inadequate. These are linkages between plan components, synchronization, plan integration, level of detail, cross-impact analyses and policy planning. This article describes each of these issues and identifies some of the projects which seem likely to contribute to their resolution. Finally, it urges each health planning agency to take advantage of the latitude in the guidelines to develop innovative solutions and to share the results with others.