Health services, health manpower, and universities in relation to health for all: an historical and future perspective.

The World Health Organization's goal of Health for All by the Year 2000 (HFA) has become a major force in national and international health policies. This paper deals with some of the historical roots of HFA and describes ways in which the major components of the health sector--health services, manpower, and universities--have evolved and should evolve in the future if they are to support the idea of HFA. One conclusion is that the changes called for in relation to HFA are not simply incremental extensions of previous values, structures, and functions. Rather a radical break with the past is often required. To expect otherwise is to misunderstand how fundamentally the concepts of HFA differ from values that have governed the health sector in the past. A second conclusion is that recent decades have seen a remarkable progression of new ideas and changes in the health sector, so much so that the changes called for by HFA are not so improbable as one might otherwise think.