Evaluating the use of environmental analysis in health care.

Environmental analysis should, in theory, be part of a health organization's strategic planning process. Case studies of two health care facilities, a community hospital and a teaching hospital, are presented to determine empirically how environmental analysis was actually incorporated into the strategic planning process. The use of environmental analysis was evaluated along the four sectors deemed relevant to health service organizations: socio-demographic, technological, political and economic. The difference in how environmental analysis was used by the organizations in this study centered on variations in the emphasis placed on each of these sectors rather than the overall extent to which environmental analysis was used.